CLASSIC TRAX

Music is the soundtrack of our lives. It entertains and inspires. A good song tells our story. A great song is a bookmark to our soul, transporting us back through the corridors of our memory to a specific place and time. Read the stories behind the iconic rock, pop and jazz songs of all time right here on Classic Trax.

Otis Redding: "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay"

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 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.

At the end of the first take, Redding started whistling, poorly enough that engineer Ron Capone joked that he wasn’t “going to make it as a whistler.” Redding nailed it on the third take. The whistling has been the subject of much debate. Cropper says that he always left space at the end of a song for Redding to add extra vocals, frequently ad-libbed on the spot. On this day, Cropper says, Redding simply forgot what he wanted to sing and whistled instead, merely as a placeholder to be fixed at a later date. “If he had come back that Monday, it would definitely have been different,” Cropper says. Two days later, Redding was dead. Unwilling to no-show for a gig, he boarded his small plane for Madison, Wisconsin, from Ohio. The plane plunged into a lake near Madison, killing the pilot, Redding and his entire road band except trumpeter Ben Cauley.

The song was released on January 8th, 1968. Redding’s death certainly fueled interest, but the song’s lyrics spoke to every working man who wanted to get away from the bosses and just relax a little. Those lyrics also resonated powerfully with soldiers in Vietnam, according to Doug Bradley and Craig Werner’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War. The single topped the charts on March 16th and eventually sold more than 2 million copies.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu5chXCp1Ag&feature=shar