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Otis Redding: Five Landmark Concerts and Three Key Cover Songs

You can now buy 'Change Gonna Come - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Music Of Otis Redding' in e-book form by clicking here!

I don't know about you, dear reader, but so far this book/website has seemed awfully studio-bound: yes there are the odd live albums dotted round in the discographies but a touring life was usually as important if not more so to our AAA artists. Even we can't go through every gig they ever played however, so what we've decided to do instead is bring you five particularly important gigs with a run-down of what was played, where and when and why we consider these gigs so important. Think of these as a sort of 'highlights' covering from first to last, to whet your appetite and to avoid ignoring a band's live work completely! Otis never did play that many shows as a solo act and when he did it was usually as part of a ‘package tour’ with other performers where he only got three or four songs in. Even so, there are some truly key moments of the Otis story contained here, from his first beginnings at the bottom of a star studded bill to his appearance at maybe the most star-studded bill ever assembled anywhere in the history of music, a gig which Otis owned and which made him famous. Otis may have played maybe a hundred (two hundred?) shows in his brief lifetime but I tell you something too: in all my research I never ever found a bad review of one of his gigs, which is remarkable (the worst anyone ever said was that Otis was amazing and his support act Sam and Dave were somehow even better!)

 Where: Apollo Theatre, New York When: November 13^th 1963 Why: First Gig Setlist: [  ] Pain In My Heart [  ] These Arms Of Mine

Otis was already a seasoned live performer pro by the time he made his first gig as a solo act, thanks to stints with Little Richard’s backing band ‘The Upsetters’ and his own group ‘The Pinetoppers’. However this first gig couldn’t have been more nerve-wracking with such a lot riding on it. Atlantic records had signed up the services of Otis as the bottom-of-the-bill act on a who’s-who of music headlined by Ben E King and featuring such other stars as The Coasters, Doris Troy and Rufus Thomas. As if that wasn’t enough, Atlantic were financing the live performance as a record – Otis’ first to be released, though he was already deep into sessions for his debut. The first time the world would hear Otis’ voice, then, was as effectively the warm-up act to these huge names and he only had one shot to get it right. Even performing in the auditorium would be nerve-wracking: the arena seated 1500 people – a good thousand more than Otis had ever played to before in one go.What’s more, Atlantic wouldn’t finance Booker T and the MGs to perform with him, so Otis was left singing to an unfamiliar backing band. What’s more, he got swindled: offered a then princely $400 for the performing and recording rights for two songs, it was the most money Otis had made in one night up to that time by far. Imagine his horror, then, when Atlantic informed him at the last minute that it had cost $450 to make up the sheet music for King Curtis’ Band to play his two allotted songs, which left him in debt. Otis was a wreck before going on, lonely and isolated in his dressing room and feeling sick. It took King Curtis, with whom Otis quickly struck up a rapport, to tell him: ‘You got this: forget all the sea of faces, pick out one and imagine you’re alone in the room with her’. The trick worked and Otis’ first released performance, captured for posterity on a strong-selling soul record, is a good ‘un, with Otis blowing the other much more established performers of the stage with two smoky ballads. A talent had arrived.

1)  Where: Apollo Theatre, New York When: September 10^th 1965 Why: Breakthrough Gig USA Setlist: Respect I’ve Been Loving You Too Long That’s How Strong My Love Is Papa Got A Brand New Bag

It took nearly another two years of flop singles, missed opportunities and a slow hard slog through the club circuits until Otis came back to The Apollo Theatre (the in-place to go for black soul singers) as a headlining act in his own right. By now Otis is in a good place: third and classic album ‘Otis Blue’ is five days away from release, he’s got a whole bunch of songs in his setlist that show off his natural range and after rubbing shoulders with many of soul’s names as a fellow ‘nearly’ star, he now has the likes of Dee Dee Stewart, The Marvellettes and chief rivals Sam and Dave opening for him. This marks the first time Otis would have sung two of his most famous songs in public: ‘Respect’ some two years before Areths Franklin had a hit with it and a smoky new ballad ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’. ‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’, meanwhile, had been in the set for ages but was a much talked about song in 1965 courtesy of recent cover versions by The Hollies and The Rolling Stones.  Interestingly Otis also performs a track that he rarely sang in public: James Brown’s ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’. Redding’s version won’t be released until the album ‘Live At The Whiskey-A-Go-Go’ many years after his death and suits him rather well, a tone down from James’ interpretation to become a slowly purring piece of funk rather than manic intensity.

2)  Where: Odeon Manchester UK When: September 17^th 1966 Why: Breakthrough Gig UK Setlist: Unknown but sample from the same period consists of Respect My Girl Shake Day Tripper Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song) (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction Try A Little Tenderness

Though it took until the ‘Monterey’ performance of June 1967 for Otis to be a household name in his homeland, he was already a star in Europe thanks to a memorable tour there in 1966 on the back of strong sales for the ‘Otis Blue’ album. Peaking with this debut gig in Britain, Otis was regarded as a king of music in Europe where many of the day’s brightest and finest had namechecked him as a star of the future they admired – The Rolling Stones and The Animals, for instance, between them got Otis a coveted appearance on a ‘Ready Steady Go!’ TV special that year. Otis even had an ex Animal, Alan Price, as his ‘warm-up’ act for a coveted show that was the talk of the nation, for a few weeks at least. Perhaps more importantly, though, it’s the first time he worked with Booker T and the MGs on stage rather than just in the studio: aware that he needed a smaller band for financial costs, he reluctantly agreed that he would leave the Bar-Keys and the Mar-Keys behind and make the biggest splash possible (This pleased the organisers who also had the MGs as an act in their own right, playing their big 1962 UK hit ‘Green Onions’). By now Otis has a seriously strong live act, full of most of his celebrated classics, although unfortunately nobody thought to record this tour – it’s the more famous return the following year (with Otis the guinea pig for a whole troupe of Stax stars) that will be released posthumously as ‘Live In Europe’ and will be filmed for posterity, turned into the documentary-concert film of the same name. At the time of this show Otis admitted sheepishly to the Melody Maker that he’d never been out of America except for one brief holiday in Jamaica and had under-estimated the jetlag involved. Worryingly he talks about how excited he is to even be on a plane for only the second time in his life, a mere fifteen months before the one that will take his life. He must have put on a good show, though, as all the papers raved about him, as indeed they did for the rest of the brief tour. Otis did have to modify his setlist after this first gig though: told that his lyric in ‘Try A Little Tenderness’ of ‘a shaggy dress’ might be too rude (Americans don’t really have the slang term ‘shag’ for sex’) he made sure to sing the line as ‘shabby dress’ – over-exaggerating the enunciation to comic effect every time he sang it. The shows also marked the first time that Otis met his future duet partner Carla Thomas, who was also on the bill.

3)  Where: Monterey Pop Festival, California When: June 17^th 1967 Why: Breakthrough Gig Planet! Setlist: Shake I’ve Been Loving You Too Long Respect (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction Try A Little Tenderness

The big one that made Otis a star! The Monterey Pop Festival was meant to celebrate all types of music around in the summer of love and the organisers (including The Mamas and The Papas and Paul Simon plus various Stones and Beatles) were adamant that black soul and r and b acts would have to be included to fulfil that request. At first, though, soul went down very badly with the ‘love crowd’ – on the Friday night Otis’ one-time rival Lou Rawls was the closest to a name act and his act went down poorly with the crowd. By the end of Saturday though, after so many free-wheeling psychedelic bands and Ravi Shankar, the crowd was growing restless. Not quite sure who Otis was, the crowd suddenly found that the performer had grabbed their attention. ‘Shake!’ bellowed Otis into the microphone, all trace of nerves gone, demanding the crowd join in with him, while working up a sweat. Otis was coming off the back of the 1967 European Stax tour and his confidence was sky-high. You can tell as rather than ignoring the crowd and singing to one woman he addresses everyone, commenting on the size and spectacle and treated the crowd intimately as if they’re all one person. This wasn’t just noisy soul either: Otis absolutely nailed his target audience, offering up a revved up Rolling Stones favourite to make up for those disappointed that band couldn’t come (though Brian Jones, in the crowd and a big Otis fan, must have loved it), a recent feminist anthem (‘Respect’ which Otis joked had just been ‘stolen’ from him) and aching ballad ‘Try A Little Tenderness’ which was so utterly perfect for its times with its mini-skirt dresses and talk of love. Otis nails the inter-song banter too, asking the audience ‘This is the love crowd, right? We all love each now don’t we? Let me hear you say yeah!!!!’ What the summer of love crowd wanted as much as love and peace and flowers, though, was authenticity and in Otis they found both. Within twenty minutes he went from being one of the most obscure acts on the bill to American white audiences to one of the most adored performers on the planet. Otis didn’t even get to play a full show (the second day of Monterey was over-running so badly he got yanked off stage after five songs, not the seven or eight he was planning to play) telling the audience ‘I gotta go – Lord, I don’t want to go!’ What are those other songs Otis might have played? Rumour is he had ‘Day Tripper’ all ready to go alongside ‘Satisfaction’ as his other tip of the hat to the 1960s’ premier bands who couldn’t show at Monterey (he used to perform ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ sometimes too), while he would surely have found room for his other major hits of the period ‘Mr Pitiful’ and ‘Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song)’. By eliminating those two, though, Otis was canny: this wasn’t a day for pity or misery, this was a day for happiness. And he was no longer a lovable pitiable loser but the single hottest act on the planet. Overnight Otis’ back catalogue was suddenly high in the charts again, but the day changed Otis more than in terms of fame or money. The love and serenity and equality that he’d witnessed at Monterey fed its way into his writing and his last batch of songs are very different to the ones he played at the gig, influenced by the psychedelia and folk of the other acts around him. Otis was a changed man.

4)  Where: Leo’s Casino, Cleveland When: December 9^th 1967 Why: Final Gig Setlist: Respect Try A Little Tenderness Knock On Wood Satisfaction Tramp (incomplete)

Unfortunately Otis didn’t live long enough for us to see much of that change on-stage. Just six months later here we are at his final show. Otis’ last full day on Earth was a very busy day as his promoters urged him to build up as much interest in his Christmas shows as he could. Otis and his Mar Keys and Bar Keys backing band criss-crossed America a lot, playing endless shows here and there (1967 is by far the busiest of his touring years). This week it was Cleveland’s turn, Otis playing three shows that week (this being the last) with an appearance on TV show ‘Upbeat’ in the afternoon. It apparently went down very well, as Otis had done all year; certainly the TV footage is some of Otis’ absolute best. The very next day they had a gig to play at the University of Wisconsin and took off, unwilling to cancel despite some nasty Wintry weather. Knowing that he had a busy few months ahead of him, Otis had even invested in an aeroplane in the Autumn for his band to speed things up, chartering a Beechcraft H18, one of the most successful plane types in the world (at least until 1969 when, partly due to its involvement in Otis’ death, it was pulled from service). Nobody quite knows what went wrong but, only four miles from home, their plane radioed in or help and a request for an emergency landing. They never made it. Instead the plane crashed into Lake Wisconsin, at the time packed full of deadly ice. Otis, four members of the Bar-Keys band, their valet and the pilot all died in the crash, with trumpet player Ben Cauley the only survivor (he had undone his seatbelt when he felt something might be wrong and got thrown clear of the wreckage) and Otis’ lifeless body was discovered the next day still in the seat he was strapped into. This mean that Cleveland unexpectedly became the site of his last full performance. Sadly we don’t have a full setlist for this show, which by Otis’ standards was one of his smallest gigs post-Monterey. It seems likely though that he would have ended the set the way he usually did with ‘Try A Little Tenderness’, while the last song he sang in public on that TV show was in retrospect an ironic choice: the ‘I need good luck’ song ‘Knock On Wood’. Otis never did get to sing in public a song he’d recorded that very same busy week ‘Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay’.

That passing on of the musical baton works the other way too and there are lots of acts who were in turn inspired by Otis. Some of them even covered his songs and in this other regular feature we give you three covers that we consider to be amongst the very best out of the ones we've heard (and no we haven't heard them all - do you know how many AAA albums out there are out there even without adding cover songs as well?!) The trouble with Otis is that he didn’t write all that many of his songs himself – perhaps ten released in his lifetime and another ten that came out posthumously. Perhaps that’s why to date Otis has only ever had the one ‘tribute’ LP ‘Soul Instinct’, which is unusual for an artist who died so young and so loved. Recorded live in 1993, it’s a bit of an oddball as live LPs go (even if Rufus Thomas in particular turns in a good set). Instead we’ve looked to three rather more studio-bound recordings for our list. Interestingly all three are covered by girls – why does Otis’ songs appeal so much to female singers I wonder?  Is it the tenderness underneath all that power? The fact that Otis, as ‘Mr Pitiful’, was more approachable by the other gender than other soul singers? The success of the irst big Otis cover song as listed here as our first entry? Or is it just that male singers know that they can’t ever get close to the original?

1)   [   Respect (Aretha Franklin, A Side, 1967)

‘I had this song that this girl stole from me, a good friend of mine, this girl she just took this song – but I’m still gonna do it anyway!’ That’s how Otis introduced this song to the Monterey crowd in June 1967 out of ‘respect’ to Aretha Franklin who had scored a huge hit with this track earlier in the year. Most of the crowd were surprised: Otis’ original was an album track that hadn’t made much impact and many in the crowd wondered why a man was huffing and puffing a feminist anthem on stage. The song wasn’t written that way originally though – knowing Otis he probably had the Civil Rights movement in the back of his mind when he wrote this song, although the starting point was a grumpy trip home in a tour bus with backing band The MGs when Otis was griping about getting ‘no respect’ and drummer Al Jackson’s response ‘well, maybe you’ll find respect at home’. Jerry Wexler, producer of Otis’ version, loved the song and recommended it to Aretha who back in 1967 was on the cusp of stardom and looking for a breakthrough song. She had never met Otis at the time of recording and was a bit nervous of it, having altered some of his words and arrangement along with the help of her backing singer sister Carolyn Franklin (this is where the ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T. tell you what it means to me’ version common to all the other cover versions that follow originates, along with soul’s first ever ‘sock it to mes’). Figuring the song needed  a bridge, Wexler then copied a part from a Sam and Dave song he liked ‘When Something Is Wrong With Me Baby’. The new arrangement was a huge hit,  spending two weeks at the top of Billboard (the only Otis song to do so in his lifetime), especially with the feminist movement who saw all sorts of things in this song that weren’t anywhere near Otis’ thoughts on the original. Thanks partly to Otis’ push at Monterey the song re-charted all over again in July 1967 and inspired a whole bunch more cover versions from Diana Ross to Joss Stone. Aretha’s remains the best, though, with the most heart and a liveliness that only Otis’ original can match.

2)  [  ] Security (Etta James A Side 1968)

I was always surprised that Otis and Etta’s careers never crossed paths – a similarly polite yet powerful singer, like Otis she combined the sheer power and charisma of Otis Redding with the subtlety and depth of an idol they shared, Sam Cooke (she even went to his funeral). Surely a far more suitable choice for the ‘King and Queen’ album of duets than Carla Thomas, Etta was only three years Otis’ senior but had already achieved a huge career before he’d even got going, scoring her first hit aged fifteen. Her career was on the wane by the time the Beatles came along and washed her style of r and b/jazz hybrid away and she was getting increasingly ill thanks to an addiction to heroin and prescription painkillers. Maybe some of that bleeds into her jaw-dropping performance of one of Otis’ more obscure original songs, released as a tribute to him just a few weeks after he died in early 1968. Rather than ‘respect’ Etta longs for ‘security, at any costs’ and this song is a good foil for Aretha’s cover, demanding faith and love from her man in a similarly powerful way. She doesn’t change as much as Aretha did, but does find the time to add a few lines here and there: ‘Your love is alright, but I need a little more honey!’ she cackles at one point. An impressive cover, also included on the album ‘Tell Mama’ which AAA fans might be intrigued to learn features the original of one of Janis Joplin’s most recorded songs as its title track.

3)  [  ] I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (Cat Power ‘From The Dark End Of The Street’ 2008)

Timeless music never dates and I wonder how much of Cat Power’s 21^st century audience realised that this song was forty years old at the time it was recorded here. Born Charlyn Marie Marshall in Atlanta, Georgia, local lad Otis was an obvious influence for this smoky-voiced former model. Otis’ slowest tempoed original ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ is a good match for Cat’s vocals as she teases out every note against a backing that’s more jazz than soul, though keeping in Steve Cropper’s increasingly fragile sounding guitar riffs. The drums a little bit heavy and boom-thwacky, but otherwise the arrangement is impressively simple and could itself have come straight out of the 1960s. Well worth hearing – Otis covers could become a habit to me after three of the better AAA trios out there.

A Now Complete List Of Otis Redding Articles To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:

‘Pain In My Heart’ (1964) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/otis-redding-pain-in-my-heart-1964.html

'The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/if-youre-regular-tothis-site-you-may.html

'Otis Blue' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-4otis-redding-otis-blue-1965.html

'The Soul Album' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015_04_12_archive.html

'Complete and Unbelievable - The Otis Redding Dictionary Of Soul!' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/complete-and-unbelievable-otis-redding.html

‘King and Queen’ (1967, with Carla Thomas) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/otis-redding-and-carla-thomas-king-and.html

Surviving TV Footage 1965-1967 plus The Best Unreleased Recordings  http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/11/otis-redding-surviving-tv-footage-1965.html

Non-Album Songs 1960-1967 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/otis-redding-non-album-songs-1960-1967.html

A Short Guide To Booker T and The MGs https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-short-aaa-guide-to-music-of-booker.html

Live/Compilation/Rarities Albums 1963-2014 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/otis-redding-livecompilationrarities.html

The 1968 Xmas Single and Seasonal Extras http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/12/christmas-special-otis-reddings-xmas.html

Otis Redding Essay: It Takes Two – The Art Of Melancholy In Soul Music https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/05/otis-redding-essay-it-takes-two-art-of.html

Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/06/otis-redding-five-landmark-concerts-and.html

 

Otis Redding Essay: It Takes Two - The Art Of Melancholy In Soul Music

You can now buy 'Change Gonna Come - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Music Of Otis Redding' in e-book form by clicking here!

I used to think I knew what the secret to soul music was, dear listener. It was the sound of one stubborn immovable object trying to get another immovable object to do what they wanted to. Not enough loving, too much loving, loving the wrong way, loving the right way but not often enough, too much freedom, too much of a trap: most soul music is men or women huffing or puffing about their other half and getting sweaty as they try to change their minds by force. James Brown, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Ray Charles – everyone who came before Otis seemed to be not so much ordering as bullying o bargaining. With the odd exception of a song like ‘Shake’ (is it really soul?) that encouraged you to dance, most soul songs weighed you down with the weight of battle. Almost all soul singers spent their careers wanting something so desperately that they would get down on their knees and plead for change.

And then came Otis and suddenly all that soul DNA became enveloped in more dimensions somehow, as if it was telling the part of a wider story. Otis didn’t beg. Otis didn’t plead. Otis didn’t huff and puff the way his predecessors did. Though Otis was physically bigger than any other soul singer (‘six feet one, weigh one hundred and ten’ as he puts it himself in his song ‘Love Man’) and sweated buckets on stage with the best of them, something seemed different about him somehow, subtler. He was vulnerable for starters. Otis’ first big hit and the song that changed his career was titled [  ] ‘Pain In My Heart’ and reacted to events, rather than famous soul songs like ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ or ‘Please, Please, Please’ that demanded things of his partner. Rather than ordering change, Otis spends most of his career trying to put things right with his beloved instead. However he still sounded vulnerable – with power. That’s a huge trick to pull off and to my ears no one else got it right. In fact I’m not sure anyone else ever really tried it. Most soul singers got grandiose ‘characters’ and nicknames’ across their careers. James Brown was the Godfather of Soul. Sam Cooke was the King of Soul. Jackie Wilson was ‘Mr Excitement’. Even Otis’ main rivals Sam and Dave were known as ‘Double Dynamite’. What name did Otis choose for himself? ‘Mr Pitiful’. That name even became a song, so that more people could hear it, a parody of sorts of what all his rivals were doing, upbeat and enthusiastic but at the heart of it all so very very sad. Otis was the one soul singer you could count on to keep you company through a sad and lonely night, a figure for whom nothing ever seemed to be going right, for whom every relationship was going to end in heartbreak and make himself look stupid.

You just didn’t do that in soul music before Otis arrived in 1964. You don’t really do that now: who else but Otis would sing quite so many songs of melancholy in their careers? Songs where, far from seeming like superhuman the people in them seem vulnerable and weak? ‘Pain In My Heart’ was the start in a whole series of original songs about feeling vulnerable: ‘Security’ ‘Cigarettes and Coffee’ ‘My Lover’s Prayer’ ‘Ole Man Trouble’  ‘Chained and Bound’ ‘Dock Of The Bay’…they all come with the feeling that something is going wrong and all the huffing and puffing and sweat isn’t going to put it right. ‘Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song)’ even has Otis trying to write what other soul singers do and realising that he can’t, so he realises that ‘this is the only song I can sing’ instead, a song that in another’s hands would be all smiles, but here is all tears. This theme is less obvious in the soul cover songs Otis did, which tended towards the happy side of things, although that might be why – unusually for a soul singer – he reached into the rock and roll idiom too and his choices are interesting: rather than the common cover songs ‘Day Tripper’ is a rare Beatles love affair that doesn’t work out, ‘Satisfaction’ a teeth-gnashing song of frustration about everything in life, while even in-concert-only Beatles cover choice ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ isn’t exactly the happiest song in the Lennon-McCartney songbook. Nope, Otis is a pitiful figure. ‘My life is such a weary thing’ sighs Otis on ‘My Lover’s Prayer’, ‘You can’t make my life all over!’ Notably the only time Otis ever asks his love to come back to him, as he does on this song, he doesn’t do so in an ‘I promise you the Earth baby and sweep you off your feet’ way like a James Brown, but in a ‘how could you leave someone who needs you so badly he’s going to cry great rivers till you come home lyric?’

Then Otis discovered his backing band – or at any rate Stax discovered them for him. Booker T and the MGs were themselves not your average r and b instrumental band. Their playing, especially when enhanced by the Mar-Keys horn section, tends towards the melancholy. Booker T isn’t a flashy keyboard player – he plays glorious descending chords that sound like teardrops. Guitarist Steve Cropper, who co-wrote so many songs with Otis, is a master of the minor key (just check out that guitar solo on ‘Ole Man Trouble’, so full of despair and desperation). Donald ‘Duck Dunn’ doesn’t so much press home where the song is going as throb and pulse, letting the sorrow of the songs sink in. And drummer Al Jackson can play anything, including the kind of weight-of-the-world sigh that only heartbreak and despair can inspire. Booker T and the MGs can and do play happy songs and indeed most of their own discography tends towards the cheery. But they sound at their best playing sad.

‘So what?’, you might be thinking. Otis was just a sad man with a big voice and a band with the scale to match it. But that melancholy is important because it allows Otis to do things differently to everyone who came before him. It’s easy to get stuck in one place if you sing soul: there are only so many ways you can ‘show off’, plead endlessly, order the person of the opposite sex to do what you want them to do and yell ‘gotta gotta gotta’ while you go red in the face. But the melancholy in Otis’ work allows him to tease out extra nuances in his writing. He’s not tied to just sitting in one place and can go anywhere. Soul music can suddenly do regret, not hope. It can do guilt, not pride. It can do multiple layers and this gives Otis a subtlety his forebears can’t reach. Take a song like ‘Try A Little Tenderness’: it’s his gentler instruction to any macho men listening to soul records for advice in their love lives: sometimes being yelled at by a tough guy isn’t always the way to go, he says, try it with some sensitivity instead. ‘Just One More Day’ is an earlier song on the same theme: ‘I’ll buy you anything you want me to buy, and I will love you till the day you die, if you please let me have one more day!’ Otis cries. You believe him, in a way that you don’t always believe Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, James Brown and co who are playing a character. We know that this is the ‘real’ Otis somehow, a gentle giant who has fun playing at a romantic caricature like ‘Love Man’ but is really struggling to keep his shit together like the rest of us.

Where did this come from? Well, here is my guess – but I stress it is only a guess. Otis was an autobiographical writer, perhaps more than he’s ever been given credit for. His life impacted his music more than it did most soul singers – perhaps because he was a lot more sensitive than most soul singers and less concerned about playing a role. Otis, though, was sensitive to the degree that he worried about everything, because he knew how easy it was for life to change and to lose everything. He was certain that he was about to lose everything important in his life any day now and much of the  sadness in his work came out of fear. His dad was poorly with TB for most of his childhood and could have died at any time; this is unsettling for anyone, but it also left Otis was the family’s chief breadwinner from the moment he left school early at fifteen, aware of life’s responsibilities far too young. He then had a baby at eighteen and a wife at nineteen and it changed his life – the couple had a chance meeting after she went to see a band run by local Georgian singer Johnny Jenkins when she fell for backing singer Otis. Keen to make his acquaintance, she got nervous and her words came out as a row: why did he have to sing like that? Their relationship started with an argument then and there would be many more, in between the kisses. It was a relationship that was clearly based on love and where the pair adored each other – but did they adore each other enough to stay together in between the temper tantrums? Otis seems to have been asking himself that question up to the day he died, past his seventh wedding anniversary.

Desperate to make it in the music business, he moved out of Georgia at the age of twenty to try to make it as a singer in Los Angeles – wife Zelda and son Dexter stayed behind. While other soul singers had the life they always dreamed of out on the road, partying every night and with a different girl (sometimes boy) on their arm after every gig, Otis went back to his hotel room alone. He yearned to be with them, doing the things other couples took for granted. He longed to do the ordinary things every other soul singer ignored and make them out to be special moments. Even after he became a success and bought his wife and child a mansion to keep the rain off their heads, he hardly ever got the time to spend with them – he was too busy touring or recording and trying to get a hurried message through to them on the phone. Even the rows in what was an often stormy relationship, the sort of thing that other soul singers always vented about, seemed somehow special to Otis: with so little in his life that was solid and so much risk of it being taken away, he was always anxious to please, to put things right, to make up any differences that happened. Zelda once said to a reporter that ‘every single song Otis sang I felt as if he sang it for me’ and she’s probably not far wrong. Just as Otis got through his first overwhelming gig on the advice that he should aim to sing to just one girl in his audience and the rest would believe it and follow, so he realised more and more that this one girl was her. And he was worried that without her he might not be able to sing at all. One of the most moving of Otis’ songs is a lyric that was written about what he wanted most in his life: not love, not happiness, not perfection. But [  ] ‘Security’. And Otis is wary, paranoid even, that what he’s got is all going to be taken away and that there is nothing he can do about it.

You could argue that he found it. Zelda was so distraught at his early death at aged twenty-six (when she was only twenty-three) that she said she could never possibly fall in love again – and she hasn’t, even with the fiftieth anniversary of Otis death come and gone. There’s never been a moment of doubt in her voice in public in all the years since that Otis was made for her and it would no doubt have done soul’s gentle giant the world of good to hear that. I’ve never doubted it either: most of their arguments were probably not because she wasn’t in love but because she felt insecure too. She was fifteen when they met and she was swept off her feet; eighteen when she had her first child and she was alone for long stretches of their marriage when Otis was off on the road. She thought her husband was the most attractive and talented man in the world and he was off on the road alone; of course she probably feared that he was about to run off any day too. At times he might well have done, certainly that’s what the guilt in many of his songs seems to suggest sometimes. But nobody has ever come forward with a paternity test and said ‘Otis was my father!’ and there has never been a ‘ten girls a day shock’ revelation about Otis, even after he died (and couldn’t sue, which is what happens to so many leading figures after they die – especially when young and famous). Whatever the cause of that doubt, though, it seems to have fuelled both of them in this period. Otis loved Zelda but couldn’t be sure if she loved him; in turn Zelda loved Otis but couldn’t be sure he loved her. There were cracks in their relationship as early as the first album and Otis mines this uncertainty in his songs. Is today going to be the day she walks out on him? Is it today that this minor fight will blow up into something he can’t stop? Otis is terrified of losing what he knows is the love of his life too and the Redding catalogue is a series of songs, original and borrowed, that charts their rise and fall together as a couple far more than any other soul writer ever did (Otis may have got some of this from his hero Sam Cooke, but Cooke’s love life was complex and full of strife: his first wife died soon after their divorce in a car crash and his second was in the process of splitting up from when he died after the death of their son in their family swimming pool, not to mention at least three children born out of wedlock). Otis’ problem, by contrast, is that the family home is his sanctuary and escape – but he also feels a drive to write and record and sing that takes him away from home for so many long periods. Will his wife let him do this? Or will he lose both (with pretty much 100% of his songs about Zelda somewhere?)

On the first album ‘Pain In My Heart’ Zelda is the only thing that’s going right – that he no longer doubts anything when ‘I hold you in these arms of mine’. Second album ‘Soul Ballads’ has Otis pledging himself in a much more determined, anxious way. ‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’ he promises Zelda, while offering to be ‘Your One and Only Man’. Both songs, though, come with an added dimension of worry and doubt – he can’t feel safe when they’re together anymore, he needs her to know it, to prove it to her. Both songs and plenty more on that album come with a weight, a desperation, a pleading that’s hidden away in the minor keys, the sigh of Otis’ vocal in between his promises of love and a horn section that feels unstoppable, a pressure that’s too much for even this powerful singer to bear. ‘Chained and Bound’, a song that reads from the title as if it’s going to be another soul song about escaping the clutches of a girl, is the happiest we ever hear Otis, more than happy to be with the one he loves (‘I don’t have to worry no mo’!’) However even this song has Otis aware that he’s never at home, sighing ‘what kind of love is this I’m giving?’

Then we have the great ‘Otis Blue’, an album released as Otis has realised all his career objectives and become a headline act at last, a popular draw across Europe that everyone is talking about as the next big thing. But you wouldn’t know that from the music: every time he plays halfway around the world he’s another day away from his sweetheart. Emotionally this is the album where all things have gone wrong: it starts with the messy chaos of ‘Ole Man Trouble’, moves on to the argument that ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (And I Ain’t About To Stop Now)’, features a revved up ‘Satisfaction’ and sighs over the fact the narrator never had it so good on ‘You Don’t Miss Your Water’. This is a haunted man, as far away from James Brown’s look-at-me antics as it’s possible to get; Otis wants to run away and hide from everyone. ‘The Soul Album’ seems on first hearing to be happier – but even that record starts with an unlikely opening song with the tearful ballad ‘One More Day’ as Otis pleads with Zelda to stay just one more day so he can enjoy their time together just a tiny bit longer. There’s a four note phrase buried away in this song, in the horn arrangement that’s the most emotional moment of any of these recordings: ‘Please don’t leavvvvve meeeee!’ it intones between Otis’ promises of a brighter future. It kinda works, but fifth record ‘Dictionary Of Soul’ is a very schizophrenic album when you scratch under the surface. Half of it finds Otis strangely at peace: ‘Try A Little Tenderness’ is the sound of someone whose finally worked out how to cope with marital strife, by being kind and supportive and ‘Hawg For You’ is as sexual as Otis ever got, an innuendo song where all that testosterone spills over into a lyric that almost seems to write itself. But then there are the guolty songs: ‘Lord Have Mercy’ is the one time Otis tries his rival’s usual spirit on for size and it doesn’t fit (‘How many kisses have I stole?’ he starts, before backtracking and apologising for the rest of the song); ‘I’m Sick Y’all’ and ‘Lord Have Mercy’ are also both pleas to the universe to put things right because they’re out of Otis’ hands.

It might be significant that the last album of Otis’ career is a duets album, one mostly made up of breakup songs, as if he’s desperate to give an audience to his wife’s views as well. However more significant I think are the songs that Otis went on to write in the second half of 1967 in the most prolific creative outpouring of his life, none of them released in his lifetime. ‘Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay’ is the most obvious of course: Otis has lost everything, he has no home to go to and we even hear that his home is in Georgia, exactly where it really was making this a more autobiographical, confessional song than normal. But now Otis is afraid to go home to the house that once offered so much security and so he cools his heels by the docks, wasting time, without even as much of a band as normal to support him as he cools his heels and whistles, completely alone for the first time in song. It’s there in other songs too though: Zelda was herself a wannabe songwriter and though she was reluctant to get her work on her husband’s albums for fear of nepotism it might be significant that the only song of hers Otis ever sang is the heartbreaking [  ] ‘I’ve Got Dreams To Remember’. It sounds to us now like eerie fortune telling as Otis’ lover gets on a plane that ‘stole you away from me’ given that this is what will happen forever only a few weeks (days even?) after the recording took place. But assuming that Zelda didn’t have a premonition it seems like the natural end of their love story that’s been played out on song since the beginning and tells the story from her side: what if after getting on this plane he never comes back? Oh well, at least she found the love of her life and has memories, even if she no longer has his physical presence anymore. Even with all these other sad songs where Otis sounds as if tears aren’t far from his eyes, they’re closest in this song which he almost whispers, afraid of hearing what these words have to say to him.

Almost as eerie is Otis’ own ‘I’m Coming Home’ in which he sighs that his woman has left him and taken the house, leaving him a ‘lost and lonely little boy’ with nowhere to turn. Or [  ] ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ where he sighs that ‘I made a mistake’ and ‘I miss you all the time’. Or [  ] ‘Waste Of Time’ where Otis finally caves in and huffs and haws the way his contemporaries did, only in a twist it’s a song demanding not love but release: ‘My heart can’t stand it!’ he cries. Or [  ] ‘Free Me’ with its haunting opening verse: ‘Turn me loose, free me darling, let me go from your love now’. It feels like a love story that’s run its course and that the melancholy that’s been there since day one has slowly swelled up and overwhelmed the songs to the point where there’s nothing else.

Or is this too simple? Zelda for one is adamant that she never loved her husband more than she did at the end of his life and that they were never closer. She famously sued author Scott Freeman for comments he made in his excellent biography ‘The Otis Redding Story’ that he was thinking of divorcing Zelda. That’s probably going a bit far: the Otis Redding of these songs would never have gone through it. But I do think that he lived with the fear, rightly or wrongly, that she would end it each and every day. Various biographies think that Otis, like many music stars, wasn’t immune to sleeping round during busy nights on tour too. Maybe it was more his guilt that one day she might find that out?

Whatever the source of that melancholy, it makes the world of difference to Otis’ music. There have been other great singers in the soul idiom before Otis, who can hold the attention of a room and use all their effort and willpower to deliver a rocking song. There are some around now, though soul music does seem to be something of a dying art. Hopefully soon in the future there will be more. But Otis is, up till now at least, unique. I love the irony that it took the biggest, butchest, heaviest soul singer with the biggest voice to turn around the world’s most extroverted genre and make it introverted. I love the idea that the man who was given that many God given talents spent his times full of doubts and worries as the rest of us. I love the thought that although Otis was huge and powerful, it was the subtle of his delivery that moves you and that the power was couples with authenticity. I love the fact that he took the most macho musical genre around and urged his audience to try a little tenderness. I love the fact that he called himself ‘Mr Pitiful’ when he was one of the most wonderful musicians on the planet with so much going for him. Otis may shout, but does so when trying to repair a tender flower. He may moan in frustration, but it’s not out of ego but because he really cares. He may have been built like a boxer, but he sang fragile love songs to a fragile love crowd. If anyone helped soul music find its soul it was Otis, by recognising that life doesn’t have to perfect for you to strut your stuff.

A Now Complete List Of Otis Redding Articles To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:

‘Pain In My Heart’ (1964) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/otis-redding-pain-in-my-heart-1964.html

'The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/if-youre-regular-tothis-site-you-may.html

'Otis Blue' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-4otis-redding-otis-blue-1965.html

'The Soul Album' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015_04_12_archive.html

'Complete and Unbelievable - The Otis Redding Dictionary Of Soul!' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/complete-and-unbelievable-otis-redding.html

‘King and Queen’ (1967, with Carla Thomas) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/otis-redding-and-carla-thomas-king-and.html

Surviving TV Footage 1965-1967 plus The Best Unreleased Recordings  http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/11/otis-redding-surviving-tv-footage-1965.html

Non-Album Songs 1960-1967 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/otis-redding-non-album-songs-1960-1967.html

A Short Guide To Booker T and The MGs https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-short-aaa-guide-to-music-of-booker.html

Live/Compilation/Rarities Albums 1963-2014 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/otis-redding-livecompilationrarities.html

The 1968 Xmas Single and Seasonal Extras http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/12/christmas-special-otis-reddings-xmas.html

Otis Redding Essay: It Takes Two – The Art Of Melancholy In Soul Music https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/05/otis-redding-essay-it-takes-two-art-of.html

Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/06/otis-redding-five-landmark-concerts-and.html

Otis Redding and Carla Thomas "King and Queen" (1967)

You can now buy 'Change Gonna Come - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Music Of Otis Redding' in e-book form by clicking here!

Otis Redding and Carla Thomas "King and Queen" (1967)

Knock On Wood/Let Me Be Good To You/Tramp/Tell It Like It Is/When Something Is Wrong With My Baby/Lovey Dovey//New Year's Resolution/It Takes Two/Are You Lonely For Me, Baby?/Bring It On Home To Me/Ooh Carla Ooh Otis

"I'm the only son of a gun this side of the sun!"

Well, dear reader, here we are at last. This week marks our 500th review. Yes that's right, we've had ever so nearly ten years' worth of news, views and music, of madcap videos starring dogs in top hats, of albums that have soared high fallen low or passed into mediocrity somewhere in the middle and of more Spice Girls jokes than they've had reunions. As I write this there remains just fifteen more reviews to go until we've finished the main leg of our journey (don't worry, there are more than enough articles to keep the site going to the middle of 2018 when the first of our spin-off books should, touch Ronnie Wood, be ready) - although David Crosby's is due soon and Neil Young's been quiet for three whole months now so he's surely cooking up a new one, with probably a few others to come before too long to. Even so we're nearer the end than the beginning and it's been a pleasure having you alongside whether you've read every single article on here (we seem to have had a flurry of activity from Russia recently, which suggests either one person is reading a lot or lots of people are still trying to get to the end of the same article - hello if either refers to you!) or whether this is your first arrival. And what better way to celebrate 500 issues and five centuries than a telegram from The Queen?

Ah OK, sorry, got that wrong. Looks as if Her Maj is busy wasting taxpayer's money by doing something more useful to the world (like watching some people on a horse march up and down or opening a factory of her son's Duchy original biscuits or something) so we haven't actually got The Queen. Better yet, though, we've got rock (and soul) royalty in the shape of not just the Queen but The King as well. The King is, of course, Otis and he wears the crown well, even if he's never sounded more a man of the people than on this working class fears and favourites kind of an album. Carla Thomas, daughter of 'Walkin' The Dog With A Top Hat' singer Rufus, is less well known, though she had already released three albums before pairing up with Otis and had already been billed 'The Queen Of Memphis Soul' by collectors of Stax Records, while she'll release her own spin-off solo set 'The Queen Alone' shortly after this one. The result is the only true duets album in the AAA canon (Paul and Linda McCartney's 'Ram' and the Godley-Creme albums don't really cut it as 'traditional' duets albums), which gives us a rare 'first' for our 500th review as well! What was that? You've never heard of this album or Carla Thomas even though you thought you'd bought everything Otis ever made and currently own twelve copies of 'Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay'? Well, nor have most people, with fans generally seeing this album - the last full new release of Otis' lifetime - as something of a cul-de-sac and with only the album single 'Tramp' standing any chance of appearing on any compilation albums.

In truth 'King and Queen' is not a record you need to know or one whose tracks deserve to be heard alongside the likes of 'Try A Little Tenderness' or 'I've Been Loving You Too Long' . Far from being Rock Royalty or two singers at the top of their game coming together, it's actually a rather drastic attempt by Stax producer Jim Stewart to get extra mileage and double the fanbase for two singers whose career seemed to have stalled. Strange as it seems to think it now, Otis was having quite a quiet time after the blaze of his career in the 1965 period, his fifth album 'The Dictionary Of Soul' suffering from the lowest sales since his first 'Pain In My Heart'. Otis, who'd only really been truly successful in Europe till now, hadn't really broken through at all in his American homeland and this was a rather drastic attempt to re-mould his career from a soul singer of passion into the kind of sweet young gentlemen you wouldn't mind inviting into your home. Stax weren't to know - and neither was Otis - that the contract he'd just signed to appear at the Monterey Pop Festival just three months down the line from this album release was going to change his fortunes forever and re-shape him back to what he should be: a wild, tempestuous singer who gave his all. Carla, too, has seen better days since her big career breakthrough with her dad's duet song  'Cause I Love You' (almost as creepy as Frank and daughter Nancy crooning 'Somethin' Stupid' to each other when you stop and think about it) back in 1961 back when she was still in high school.

On paper their combination should have worked. He's a soul legend, creativity oozing from every pore and a workaholic who nevertheless manages to sound entirely natural and unrehearsed, as passionate as singers come. She is, as it happens, much the same, with a sharp-toothed grin that actually reminds you of a higher pitched Otis at times, with the same emotional resonance and the same hard work and talent. There are however a few problems here. One is that the pair are not 'allowed' to sound like their natural selves, so what we get here is a somewhat halting, cleaned-up version of emotion with neither Carla nor Otis sounds entirely comfortable with, a 'chocolate box' version of talent that's meant to be heard raw and edgy. Another is that the pair do have chemistry (despite what some reviewers think), just not the chemistry for these songs. Though Otis and Carla are only a year apart in age (Him by a year) they sound less like husband and wife and more like older brother and younger sister, too similar and too sex-free to truly get to the heart of this collection of songs about husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend or nice girl and stalker. The moment where they sound most at home is when they're playing at being at each other's throats on 'Tramp', where you suspect the take ended in a big giggle after the tapes stopped rolling. Though Otis is 'The Love Man' and Carla isn't far behind their sex appeal has been put on hold for something more 'sweet'. A third problem is that rather than being planned as an Otis and Carla album from the beginning (when it might have played to their strengths) instead Jim Stewart asked the pair to sound like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell on their successful run of recent duet albums. Well, Otis isn't a Marvin Gaye kind of a singer. Though there is a lot of thought behind his vocals, Otis is more of an instinctive emotional singer than Marvin ever was and you could easily believe that the experienced Tammi was right there with him every step of the way. Carla sounds like what she was - a twenty-five-year-old kid, still unsure enough of her singing career to fit this album around her studies for an English degreeat Washington's Howard University - while Otis goes back to his own younger days in his attempts to match her. These two are great singers, they could even have been great singers together, but not on this material, not sung like this, not in hurried sessions that took place over a few days. I even have a suspicion that the two singers are never in the same room at the same - certainly Carla sounds much 'further away' from the Booker T and the Mgs than Otis does, with far more echo on her voice and the pair don't score off each other so much as try to keep out of each other's way.

Legend has it that Carla wasn't in fact the first choice for the album and wasn't what Otis wanted at all. We don't know who he was pushing for but I suspect it may well have been Aretha Franklin, then at the start of the rise of her fame and who was about to score big with a cover of Otis' song 'Respect', a recording which he had already heard and approved of, correctly guessing that she was going to turn the song into a feminist statement, which his never was. It seems likely that Otis wanted to do more of the same, recording edgy material that meant something, but with his last single the under-rated non-album 'I Love You More Than Words Can Say' peaking at a lowly #78 in Billboard, Otis wasn't the one calling the shots. Stewart probably put the suggestion of Carla to him with Otis comment a dry 'yeah she's from Memphis, I'm from Georgia, I guess that means we can hang!' You sense too that the material was probably decided on before Carla had even been decided on. Otis, not taking this album seriously and perhaps stung by the response to his last few original singles, was initially not going to write any songs for the album - in the end he busked the downright weird finale 'Ooh Carla, Ooh Otis' during a jam session with musician Al Bell. It makes for a very odd end to his album discography in his lifetime (Booker T guitarist Steve Cropper also gets a song on the record in favour for playing on it). Then again, equally unusual are many of the cover songs, which aren't by usual Otis favourites Little Richard or Sam Cooke (the 'safe' cover of 'Bring It On Home To Me' apart) but Isaac Hayes, Lowell Fulson and Jimmy McCracklin. None of these songs sound as if they were written with Otis in mind, never mind Carla, and Redding never sounded more uncomfortable than when singing them - even recording commercials for coca-cola he sounds a lot happier than here. Compared to where Otis had been (the charge of 'Respect, the poignancy of 'You Don't Miss Your Water', the autobiography of 'Mr Pitiful') and where he's going next (the pure heart of 'Dock Of The Bay' and it's lesser known sister song 'I've Got Dreams To Remember') this album feels lightweight and schmaltzy. Singers and material don't connect and - a big no no for soul even more than it is for rock and roll - nobody means what they sing.

So is this album a complete write-off? Not quite. Starved of Otis product and aware that it is his last will and testament as finished, many fans have gone back to this album retrospectively to try and find more in it than was probably meant at the time. They find it too, in the slow burning groove of 'Let Me Be Good To You' which features a snazzy Booker T and the MGs horn part, in the bluesy protest of 'Tell It Like It Is', in the up-tempo mayhem of 'Lovey Dovey' (a far better choice for a first single than the rather irritating  'Tramp'), in the sudden injection of confidence on the guilt-ridden 'Are You Lonely For Me Baby?' where Otis at last gets to do what he was born to do. Whilst Otis and Carla often sound as lost as Donald Trump at a Quaker meeting or me at a Spice Girls concert the MGs also perform their usual magic and make the whole thing seem bigger and better than it needs to. Though the material finds Otis a long way from home, the Memphis Group often finds a way of providing him with a branch to safety, an oh so typical organ lick or drum beat that manages to hark back to past glory days and - if only for a few lines - make Otis sound great again. Guest pianist Isaac Hayes also sounds great on this album, enabling Booker T to sound as if he in two places at once and adding a respectful twinkle to their grit and soul which works a lot better on this material than the singers. Carla too has her moments, professional enough not to get in the way when Redding starts soaring but not content with letting him get away with all of the best album moments and more than holding her own with him. Had the pair had a second shot at this and been able to do songs more to their fancy theirs could yet have beaten Marvin and Tammi and all the other Stax duets teams at work - had they even played a few gigs together first it would have been something.

What's more I love the fact that this album is so very different to pretty much every other duets album around at the time, especially on Stax. Though the pair do revive 'It Takes Two' from the Marvin and Tammi days, the rest of this album is far closer to breakup than it is to being 'lovey dovey', with that song the only other case of the singers acting being 'in love' rather than falling out of it. Instead Otis and Carla both worry their lives away - will their lover get tired of them? Are things getting harder now than when they were first married? Is there something wrong with their baby? is the other lover secretly dreaming of them even though they won't admit it and they've gone their separate ways? Does Otis really dress like a tramp?!?  This feels like an album getting ready for divorce papers, not wedding bells, which might be significant. Most biographies and documentaries say that Otis' marriage (he married young, way before his singing career!) was a paragon of virtue that kept him safe and sane. By and large I should think that's true and Zelda has been the consummate musical widow, overseeing Otis' legacy with a care and love that even Yoko Ono can't match. But was their marriage as strong in 1967 as it had been years earlier? We don't know for certain of course - and it's pointless predicting whether relationships would have got better or worse with time - but there's a definite sense of guilt in some of Otis' interviews, in public and in family, that suggest adultery was at least crossing his mind across 1967. Zelda seems to know about it too and it can't have been easy for her to see her husband leaving for these sessions with a female singer, pretending to have a 'relationship' if only on vinyl. Her response to this period is to write what should have been the first of many Otis Redding songs but instead ends up being an eerie coda, with 'I've Got Dreams To Remember' about a husband who used to be so close but is now so far away. Though not a duet, had the song been written earlier the downbeat theme and sense of regret and guilt would have slotted in perfectly on this album. That song feels like a 'goodbye' of sorts, even before a plane crash makes that a permanent farewell, but this album feels in retrospect like a precursor. Or would Otis have seen the error of his ways, spooked by this album's songs of divorce and remorse, and come home? We don't know, but it makes for a more interesting album and choice of material than this quickly made record perhaps could have been.

However some of the reviews that have been written since Otis' death, which see this album as another masterpiece (if not quite as much of a masterpiece as the other five) are surely a little ambitious, if not misguided. Far from being at the top of his game, the way we know Otis will be in the second half of the year, from Monterey right up to his final sessions during the Autumn, Redding is coasting here by his standards, with only 'Are You Lonely For Me Baby?' sounding as if he's spent any time studying or feeling the songs. Many people have started talking about this as Otis' 'frothiest' record as if that's a good thing; had this been the lengthy career it was meant to be then we could have given Otis a few stars for doing something different, but a frothy Otis is about as pointless as a Spice Girls concept album; they live in very different worlds and there really is no point to the one embracing the other. Plus I find Otis digging deep into his soul (and Carla too I have to say) far more entertaining than hearing them doing second hand cast-offs about casual trivial love when they both know that  real romance is far darker, messier and scary than that. This is the sort of album the pair should have done at the start of their careers, not at the midway point when things were looking bleak and the reception to this record at the time was cool, bordering on indifferent. Only Otis' death and his sadly shortened discography makes us see more than was probably ever meant to be there. It speaks volumes that Otis, desperate to plug this record any way he can and keep his career going, doesn't even consider performing any of these songs at his Monterey performance just three short months later (when this was his most recent product to plug by far) or even invite Carla to sing on-stage once. This was a record you sense Otis was always going to forget and leave behind as soon as possible - it's an unfortunate twist of fate that this record ended up being the final resting place for his catalogue in the end instead, at least until the posthumous releases kept coming (and it speaks volumes too that they all sound more substantial than this, even when we get to the dregs of the barrel being scraped). Still, I would rather have an inadequate Otis than none at all and after you've bought the true 'Otis Blue' five album run before this and the three posthumous records made up of those Autumn 1967 sessions first then you will still need this album to complete your collection and by then you'll be so Otisified that you'll accept anything, even a record that's at best only a third up to standard. Otis never lived long enough to make a bad record and while this is the weakest in so many ways it's not without worth and even with a cardboard crown and a gold-plated tiara Otis and Carla still sound like King and Queen enough to me.

While both Otis' and their own star was fading, Booker T and the MGs looked around for other singers to back for their weekly pay cheques. Eddie Floyd was another Stax Otis-clone and a natural choice and guitarist Steve Cropper in particular struck up a close friendship with the singer. Though 'Knock On Wood', one of their collaborations from 1966, barely outperformed Otis' recent singles with a Billboard peak of #29 (indeed Otis' peaked at #30 as the album's second single). Otis liked it enough to cover it though and he sounds more comfortable with this huffing puffing blustering song than Eddie ever did. The song was inspired by a lightning strike that happened while the two were trying to write a song, with the starting point 'the way you love me is frightening - it's like thunder and lightning!' Otis is all thunder on this song, stretching out his vocal in a 'Love Man' type of way, while the lyric is a good fit for his own songs, full of pleading and longing. Otis' narrator is agonised that he might lose his love and bids us that he's 'not superstitious' but this romance is so precious 'I ain't taking no chances'. As with so many of the songs on this album, you wonder if it's aimed partly at wife Zelda as he tries to get his marriage back on track with the help of Stax. As for Carla, she's barely here, which seems an odd move for the opening track of a duets album and this is indeed the most 'Otis' like of all these recordings.

'Let Me Be Good To You' is my favourite song on the album as it's the best use of Otis and Carla's pure personalities. Over a backing that recalls 'Soulsville 3-5-4-1-7-8-9' Otis sighs in his usual 'Mr Pitiful' voice about how every time he thinks he's on to a good thing his life falls apart, emphasising how he's 'feeling down' and how desperate he is for love. For pretty much the only time on an Otis record, though, his prayers are answered as Carla sweetly, shyly, nudges her way into the song and promises to look after him, telling Otis that she's offering her love on a 'silver platter'. Though Otis doesn't immediately bite and take the bait - setting off for an equally gloomy sounding verse despite the more upbeat lyrics about how 'love can turn a life around' - by the repeat Carla seems to have got through, this oh so typical Otis 'Sad Song' ending up somewhere cosy and content, two lost souls having somehow found their way to each other. As a result it's one of Otis' more moving songs (Carla's too) offering this poor character we've been following for three years now a shot at redemption and peace. So many of Otis' narrators' lives have been made worse by other people's actions that it's just good to hear someone offering to help and this is a rare love song where both sides pledge their love, support and allegiance to each other, both of them scared of being hurt again but prepared to take the risk for the other anyway. The result is perhaps Isaac Hayes' greatest composition (far more than his other famous songs like 'Soul Man' or 'Theme From Shaft'), so it's odd to report that musically he's the 'odd one out' here, his flowery piano tinkles a million miles away from the weight Booker T and co are giving to this piling, preening soul song. Even so it's the best thing on the album by a country mile.

Many fans like Jimmy McFracklin's fun 'Tramp' best, the album's first single that restored Otis back up the charts even before his Monterey revival with a Billboard high of #26. However I'm not sure this song was a suitable choice for either singer. Otis always prided himself in looking smart, seeing what he wore as an extension of himself far more so than most soul singers (Sam and Dave were never this nattily dressed!) Carla was and is a sweetheart, more likely to help somebody than attack them. So why did anyone think that a song about her ripping him for his dress sense was suitable for this album? Alas what probably started off life as an in-joke (with both sides way out of character) has rather ended up defining both of them - the few fans who've heard this song (or seen the music video with Otis as a country bumpkin) have assumed that it's accurate, that Otis was a scruffy mess and that Carla was a nasty piece of work (she's certainly good at acting here, more than convincing as Otis' nagging girlfriend wanting him to better himself). Speaking as a scruffy mess myself I can tell you that Otis was as smartly dressed as they come and some of these barbs really seem to sting! Though neither singer had a hand in writing this track, it wouldn't have been all that well known at the time so as Otis was a 'writer' who often spoke about himself you can see why so many people assumed he was doing the same thing here. It had, after all, only just been released as a single by Lowell Fulson a few months earlier and was hot off the press, but at a peak of #52 few people would have heard the original. My guess is that Otis was trying to give a career boost to a Stax writer he admired and didn't pay too much attention to the words. Alas, though, for these ears at least it doesn't sound like the fun track people describe but a row set to music and a pretty ugly row at that. 'What you call me?' barks Otis out of character. 'You heard me!' slams back Carla with an unlikely sneer in her voice before Otis boasts and tries to impress her with his 'six cadillacs' parked outside instead. The only bit that rings true is when Otis breaks off to say he don't care about what he looks like 'because loving is all I ever knew how to do!' The backing too is like a sea-sick version of the usual Otis template sound with the Mgs sticking to their one groove throughout the whole song that never quite finds a resolution. Only Al Jackson Jr's quite brilliant drumming stands out, smartly smacking and slapping the drum-kit around even when the others drop away to let Otis and Carla bad-mouth each other, mimicking what the pair probably feel like doing to each other about now. For all this song's success and respect, it's an oddly unlikeable recording from two very likeable singers.

'Tell It Like It Is' is another recent, less obscure cover. A single by Aaron Neville released in January 1967, just two months before this album, it would have become one of Stax's first #1s in the general chart had The Monkees not got in the way with 'I'm A Believer' that week. It's another song that seems an odd choice for this pair of singers, slowed down to a crawl and without the same places to stretch out that we're used to from Otis' ballads. The Bar-Keys horn section, indeed, sound as if they're playing in slow emotion while even Otis can't keep this tempo exciting. It's another row in song: with  double entendre that probably wasn't intended back in 1967 Otis tells Carla to stop treating him like a little boy and that she'd be more likely to be comforted during long lonely nights by 'a toy'. Otis is believable when he sings 'don't play with my heart!', but otherwise is having a rare off-form vocal day, 'phoning in' his lead part without really thinking too much about it. Instead it's Carla who shines when she suddenly kicks in after three verses and the song raises its level. 'Ooh Otis' she croons, 'life is too short to have sorrow, you may be here today and gone tomorrow', acting as the full-blooded warmth to his icy aloofness and she's never sounded better than here, tender and sweet and a million miles away from her best known work on 'Tramp!' It's a poignant moment too because of events that will happen less than a year later, but the sentiments work another way too - with his life so short, why was Otis wasting his time singing unsuitable slowed-down crooning songs like this?

Isaac Hayes returns with one of his best but one of his least known Sam and Dave hits, 'When Something Is Wrong With My Baby'. In another of the album highlights, this ready-made duet is given a whole new dimension by sounding as if it's being sung not by two blokey friends but by a husband and wife to each other, each stewing in their own misery and wishing the other would talk to them. Otis knows all about heartbreak and really shines on the vocal, pouring out his heart on lines about he knows his wife is 'feeling misery' but feeling helpless to put it right when she won't talk to him. You sense, from reading around the subject, that this song is his relationship with Zelda to a tee: she withdrawn and stiff-upper-lip and he emotional and fragile, each accidentally stepping on each other's toes not because they don't love each other (they clearly did) but because they don't know how to talk to one another. Carla sounds slightly lost here. She, at her best, is a similarly passionate and emotional vocalist but she's just too young and naturally upbeat a person to truly express heartbreak just yet and sounds as if she's billing and cooing while the lines talk of despair, that 'if he got a problem then I've got to find a way to help him solve it!' Forget the vocals if you like though as the MGs backing on this song is fabulous, especially the gritty rhythm section and the Bar-Keys horns slicing through the tension with a knife. This time around Hayes' own floral piano style is perfect too, adding the 'surface sound' of politeness and societal niceties that lie behind the sudden swaying passion and isolation of what is really going through the two singers' minds. It's a terrific song performed by a terrific vocalist and a terrific band, exactly the sort of thing Otis should have been doing more of on this album.

'Lovey Dovey' is a case of right song, wrong singers, a shouty breezy upbeat number that sounds out of place on this album, especially arranged the way it is with the Mgs doing their usual 'how dare you!' stance and a riff that sounds  exactly like the one for 'Soul Man'. The oldest cover song on the album by some margin, it was a big hit for The Clovers in 1954 and Otis may have recorded it as a nod of the head to label owner Ahmet Ertegun, who co-wrote the track under his pseudonym 'Nugetre' ('Ertegun' written backwards so most people wouldn't guess, though it's not exactly the greatest smokescreen in the world). This is the daft, silly, frivolous song most people take 'Tramp' to be, with two people so loved up and wrapped up in their own worlds that they're talking gibberish, or at least a form of gibberish to get more sexual innuendo past the censors: 'You're the cutest thing I ever did see, I really love your peaches wanna shake your tree!' One of the few places you can hear Otis and Carla singing at the same time, it's clear though how little their voices have in common and neither sound quite right on this track, uncharacteristically shouting. Otis isn't used to singing with carefree joy and abandon and doesn't seem quite sure of what to do, while even Carla sounds 'wrong' on this track, pushed past her warm and velvet tones to something a lot more screechy. The pair don't quite convince as doe-eyed lovers somehow, especially after so many tracks of going at each other hammer and tongs. The third album single, released as one of the first singles after Otis' death, it seems an odd way to remember him by.

Over on side two Otis is back on more familiar territory, spending these January sessions looking back over a difficult year in his love life and pleading to get things right this year. 'New Year's Resolution' seems to have been one of the few tracks written with this album in mind by a whole host of writers including another Stax singer Mary Cross (who might have been a more natural match for Otis than Carla to be honest). Otis is right at home on a track where he pleads, begs, cajoles and promises to do things better next time, getting out every ounce of his guilt and worry on another song that may well have been aimed down the microphone to Zelda back home. Nobody can sing the line 'I'm sorry' and invest it with as much meaning as Otis and his promise that 'Ooh we're going to try harder not to hurt each other again' is sung with a real purr of tenderness and remorse. Poor Carla, naturally so upbeat, is on shakier ground with her verse which seems oddly out of kilter with today's way of thinking ('Ooh I'm just a woman and they sometimes make mistakes too!') Forget the middle verse if you must though, this is still one of the album's more impressive moments. It is, though, sad to think that this brand new year that Otis is looking forward to so much will be his last - one of many spooky ironies like that littered across this album.

The huge success of Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell's duet 'It Takes Two' in January 1967 is clearly a major influence on this album. However it's a sign of just how misguided this record often is that Otis and Carla are encouraged to sing it, even though it's a track that sounds nothing like the records either of them were making before they got together. Otis as a Mr Pitiful lover pleading his wife not to go, we get - but madly off his head in love? That's a first for an Otis record and he doesn't sound at all convincing. Carla too isn't used to sounding as madly in love as she's asked to here and the chemistry just isn't there. The MGs as well sound clueless on this song, rattled ahead at full steam without the original's finesse, power or sense of wonder. The result is one of the biggest disasters in the Redding songbook that the duo should never have been allowed anywhere near; both singers, after all, tend to sing about loneliness and isolation so hearing them bleat that doing things together is more than double the fun of doing them apart is just woefully mis-cast. They could not have found a less likely song for the pair to sing together. Which is a shame because this Marvin Gaye number deserves better and is indeed one of his best, the original being chock-full of fun and delight and giggles, wrapped up in a sudden squelch of desire, longing and love. The difference is those singers knew how to be silly and frivolous - Otis , in particular, has never known how to be anything other than intense. A big mistake.

Bert Berns is most famous as Jerry Ragavoy's collaborator (writing 'Piece Of My heart' amongst others) though he wrote more than a few good 'uns alone. 'Are You Lonely For Me Baby?' is one of his best and though the song wasn't written for this album it fits it like a glove, being the third album highlight. Otis and Carla are former lovebirds living apart, trying to get on with their own lives and forget the other and move on - but they oh so can't. They still care way too much and though both plead, separately, for the other to forget them and move on they can't, wondering if the other is awake like them and dreaming of what they used to have. Reaching out to a third person whose a mutual friend, Otis sounds guilty as he hears him telling her he's no good for her, sadly agreeing and trying to keep away, though his heart is breaking. Otis is born for these sort of tracks and is wrung through with guilt and remorse with by far his most aggressive and assertive vocal on the album the perfect match for a rocky song that has him carefully climb his way through some key changes onto a major chord - only to fall the way, minor key by minor key, to the bottom. The Bar-Keys lick that laughs at him every time he tries to pick himself up and falls over again is delicious, a perfect arrangement that makes us root for Redding and his determination to move on - even when he's doomed to failure, too much in love to ever truly let his lover go. Carla too sounds mighty fine, at last getting a chance to put her passion and emotion across, equally desperate to put things right but being clueless where to even start. This is what an Otis Redding duets album should be doing - instead of celebrating how things are better when done together, it's a song about how awful and depressing they are when done apart. Superb, with another great Booker T and the MGs backing track that's about as close to rock and roll as the quartet ever came when backing Otis.

Sam Cooke was growing more and more out of fashion by 1967 since his death three years before, with too many modern soul legends to worship to be remembered by all but the faithful. Mega fan Otis, of course, was that faithful fan and you sense that 'Bring It On Home To Me' was a compromise with producer Jim Stewart: 'yes you can do a Sam Cooke song if you must, but only after you've done these other songs we know will be hits and only if you do the most obvious cover everyone else does'. The Mgs change things around compared to most versions of this song: what's usually slow and melancholy (and very Otis) has been sped up to sound keen and upbeat. This works better than you might expect, especially when turned into a duet, with Otis pleading for Carla to come home to him - and Carla agreeing not to leave him alone for long. Programmed here near the end of the album, it might be Otis' secret message to Zelda that they still had a way to go and he was going to put things 'right'; having put up with so many Sam Cooke records playing at home she'd have understood that this was a 'message' from her husband, not a song put here by his record label. It's an upbeat way for the album to (nearly) play out. Whilst it's probably the weakest Cooke cover out there Otis did (Carla sounds way too uncomfortable on a song she doesn't quite understand), Otis' delicious zestful vocal just about makes it work, full of life and joy.

The album's real closer, though, was a surprise. From the beginning this album was only meant to contain ten tracks - the least that Stax could get away with selling and with this album recorded in such a hurry they would have worked out in advance how many songs they could get away with making in that time. But then guest guitarist Al Bell started busking a riff between takes which sounded so very Otis, like 'Love Man' in fact. Otis, who'd spent less time and effort and creativity on this rushed album than any of his previous five, suddenly got inspired and grabbed a pen, jotting down some lyrics that he thought would go down well on a duets album. As it happens 'Ooh Carla, Ooh Otis' sounds like what it is - a song that was written in about five minutes before the tapes started rolling again. Of all of Otis' originals it's by far the flimsiest and is more like a list of clichés, with Otis calling Carla his 'sweet and ice cream' and Carla teasing him for the 'dimples in his jaw'. And yet the recording makes up for this. The only song here written with Carla in mind, this song plays to her strengths - her fizzy upbeat life-loving personality that can't wait to go outside and play. Otis too manages to straddle the line between this being one long in-joke and a song he's emotionally invested in. Unlike the majority of this album you can believe that these two are 'lovers', the chemistry finally kicking in at last on a neat halfway house between their styles: her joy to be alive; his relief at not being quite so alone. It's a dumb but sweet way to leave the Otis Redding songbook during his lifetime and the one track here that would have gone down a storm at the Monterey Pop Festival three months later.

To be honest, though, the surprise of this album is how little here sounds like Otis' setlist at Monterey. This is the sound of a singer on a downward spiral, bullied by his record label into recording songs he doesn't believe in or understand to make the most amount of money out of him in the shortest amount of time. New fans who'd never heard of Otis and who rushed back to hear those great songs like 'Respect' and 'I've Been Loving You Too Long' who, not knowing where to start, simply went with the most recently released album would have been bitterly disappointed: by Otis' standards this album has little heart, few emotion and not much, erm, soul. Carla, too, would have sounded like an anachronism from yesteryear to the 'love crowd' who expected their women singers to be gutsy and feisty, like Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, not sweet and joyous. You can see why this record was only viewed as a 'marking time' album in Otis' own lifetime and why the singer himself was determined to wrestle back control of his career and go somewhere newer (and sadder) with the might and respect of the Monterey crowd behind him (the December 1967 sessions that sadly never were finished before his death). However even if 'King and Queen' is Otis' flimsiest, sloppiest LP, it's not without its moments. 'Let Me Be Good To You' 'When Something Is Wrong With My Baby' and 'Are You Lonely For Me Baby?' are three excellent cover songs where the collaboration works and both singers do what they do best, perhaps the most overlooked tracks released in Otis' lifetime that always seem to get missed off compilation albums - even though there've been dozens of the things over the years with very few tracks to go round them all. Even the worst of this album has excuses - most singers told to record songs that didn't fit in a short time while his collaborator was still busy doing her coursework for her degree wouldn't have got anywhere close to this. Plus the alum artwork is pretty fab is had to be said, with some pretty good likenesses of Otis and Carla turned into playing cards, the King and Queen of Spades. This album might never be the King or Queen of your heart, but with so few Redding albums to collect they are all special and this most overlooked record might well be the biggest surprise, the most oddball one of the lot. No it's not the long lost masterpiece that modern reviewers try to claim - there are too many mistakes, pitfalls and a completely misguided choice of material for that. But all Otis is good, just as most Carla is good, and both singers come out of this album with their heads held high. I'd much rather the AAA be graced by their true blue heart and soul Royalty than the fakeness and smugness than our 'real' Royal Family, that's for sure. 

A Now Complete List Of Otis Redding Articles To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:

‘Pain In My Heart’ (1964) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/otis-redding-pain-in-my-heart-1964.html

'The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/if-youre-regular-tothis-site-you-may.html

'Otis Blue' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-4otis-redding-otis-blue-1965.html

'The Soul Album' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015_04_12_archive.html

'Complete and Unbelievable - The Otis Redding Dictionary Of Soul!' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/complete-and-unbelievable-otis-redding.html

‘King and Queen’ (1967, with Carla Thomas) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/otis-redding-and-carla-thomas-king-and.html

Surviving TV Footage 1965-1967 plus The Best Unreleased Recordings  http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/11/otis-redding-surviving-tv-footage-1965.html

Non-Album Songs 1960-1967 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/otis-redding-non-album-songs-1960-1967.html

A Short Guide To Booker T and The MGs https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-short-aaa-guide-to-music-of-booker.html

Live/Compilation/Rarities Albums 1963-2014 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/otis-redding-livecompilationrarities.html

The 1968 Xmas Single and Seasonal Extras http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/12/christmas-special-otis-reddings-xmas.html

Otis Redding Essay: It Takes Two – The Art Of Melancholy In Soul Music https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/05/otis-redding-essay-it-takes-two-art-of.html

Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/06/otis-redding-five-landmark-concerts-and.html