When the phone rang at the Stax/Volt studios in Memphis in late November of 1967, guitarist Steve Cropper was surprised to hear Otis Redding on the other end, calling from the airport. “Usually Otis would check into the Holiday Inn or whatever hotel he was staying at and then he’d call for me to come over and do some writing,” Cropper recalls. But this time Redding was too excited to wait. “I’ve got a hit,” he told Cropper, so he wanted to come straight to the studio to flesh his idea out into a full-fledged song.
Redding was right. When “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” was released less than two months later, it became the singer’s first million-seller and first Billboard Number One single. But the legendary soul singer never got to hear the finished version of his breakthrough single: He had died in a plane crash on December 10th.
Redding laid down numerous tracks in his final weeks, none more important than “Dock of the Bay.” The roots of the song trace back to June of that year. In the middle of the month, Redding, backed by Booker T. & the M.G.’s, left the largely white crowd at the Monterey Pop Festival awestruck, making an impression rivaled only by the Who and Jimi Hendrix. Redding had won over white audiences in Los Angeles at the Whisky a Go Go nightclub the previous year and in Europe that spring, where his admirers included four guys from Liverpool taking a break from recording their new album. But Monterey Pop was on a different scale, and the unabashed adulation confirmed for Redding that he could cross over to become a major star.
“Monterey had a powerful effect on Otis,” recalls Stanley Booth, who interviewed Redding for the Saturday Evening Post during those final sessions. “He saw a huge crowd of white kids going nuts over him, and he began to believe he could follow in the footsteps of Sam Cooke and Ray Charles.”
Al Bell, then a Stax executive, says that he told Redding he was getting pegged as a genre musician and “would have to come up with something different. We talked back and forth on it. I suggested he write something folk-like, saying we could call it Soul Folk. It was the only time I told Otis what to do.”
Redding had begun listening to Bob Dylan, whom he’d met at the Whisky in ’66 but beginning in June, the singer – like the rest of the world – was playing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band over and over.