Otis Redding had never seen anything so peaceful.
The California sunlight sprinkling diamonds on the calm water of the bay, the seagulls circling overhead in an azure sky, the old fishermen hauling in their nets near the docks.
While on the West Coast for an engagement at the Fillmore in June 1967, Redding and his road manager âSpeedoâ Sims escaped for a few days of R&R on a rented houseboat near Sausalito.
In that idyllic setting, Redding relaxed, gently strumming his acoustic guitar and singing two lines over and over:
Sittinâ in the morning sun
Iâll be sittinâ when the evening comes
Sims recalled, âWe must have been out there three or four days before I could get any concept as to where he was going with the song. I just didnât understand it. And lyrically, it sounded weird. He was changing with the times. And I was looking at the times change.â
For Redding, those changing times meant that heâd begun listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, smoking pot and thinking about new horizons beyond his career as an R&B barn-burner. On a deeper level, it meant personal and professional change. Heâd outgrown his marriage and fallen in love with singer Carla Thomas. He was also feeling constrained by Stax Records, who wanted to keep him on the road. But Redding had ambitions to start his own label and become a producer.
As he toured Europe that summer, Redding kept tinkering with his Sausalito tune. Five months after he started it, he brought the song-in-progress into Stax studios. On Dec. 7, he and guitarist Steve Cropper finished it in half an hour, fleshing out the story and adding a bridge.
âWhen I wrote with Otis, I always tried to make the lyric about him and his life,â Cropper said. âSongs like âMr. Pitiful,â âSad Songââthose are all about him. âDock of the Bayâ was, too. Otis trusted me. I always seemed to do the things he liked.â
To capture their creation in the heat of the moment, they gathered the MGâs and the Mar-Keys for a late-night session.
Redding was excited, conducting Booker T on piano and Al Jackson on drums, while singing horn parts to the Mar-Keys.
âWith Otis, it was all about feeling and expression,â Cropper said. âMost of his songs had just two or three chord changes, so there wasnât a lot of music there. The dynamics, the energy, the way we attacked itâthatâs hard to teach.â
It was clear to everyone present that âDock of the Bayâ was unlike anything heâd ever recorded. There were no soul shouts or grunts. No uses of âGot-ta!â or âCâmon baby.â Just Redding ârestinâ his bonesâ in the most exquisitely soulful and laid-back way.
âI knew this was it,â Cropper recalled of the playback. âIt was just a great song. We knew we finally had the song that would cross him over to the pop market.â
Not everyone agreed.
âIt was too far over the border for Jim [Stewart, Stax president],â bassist Duck Dunn said. âIt had no R&B whatsoever. I agreed with Jim. It didnât impress me. I thought it was out of context. Otis was soulful, and for him to change over and go that way, it wasnât as soulful as the Otis I knew. I thought it might even be detrimental.â
But Redding wouldnât budge. âThis is my first No. 1 record,â he said. âItâs the biggest song I ever had.â
Two days after the recording session at Stax, Redding was back out on the road, in the Midwest. On Dec. 10, he and five bandmates boarded his private plane, a twin-engine Beechcraft, bound for Nashville. Four miles into the flight, the engine failed and the plane crashed into the icy waters of Lake Monoma, near Madison, Wis. One passenger, Ben Cauley, managed to unbuckle his seat belt and survived. The other five, including Redding, drowned.
The cause of the crash was never determined. Reddingâs body was recovered the next day when the lake was dragged. He was 26.
As Redding predicted, âDockâ went to the top of the charts (it was the first-ever posthumous No. 1 by an artist in the U.S.), and became a million-seller. It won Grammy Awards for Best R&B Performance and Best R&B Song. In the years since, it has become a standard, covered by artists ranging from Peggy Lee to Pearl Jam. The most affecting cover, which reached No. 55 in 1982, was by the ReddingsâOtisâ sons, Dexter and Otis III. In 1999, BMI named it the sixth most performed song of the 20th century, with over 6 million radio performances.
Explanation: it got me 1 place