1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (24 page)

Cropper wrote a lot of tracks with Otis Redding, starting with “Mr. Pitiful,” which made it to No. 10 on the
Billboard
R&B chart in February. After Cropper heard a deejay say that Redding always sounded pitiful in his ballads, it occurred to him in the shower that the phrase might make a good song. He drove over and picked up Redding and, Cropper said, “We just wrote the song on the way to the studio, just slapping our hands on our legs. We wrote it in about ten minutes, went in, showed it to the guys, [Otis] hummed a horn line, boom we had it.”
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From then on, Redding would usually get an idea for a title, a lyric or two, a tempo, and an idea for horns, and then he would hum the horn arrangement to Cropper and the other players. Only two of his songs had background vocals; instead, horns were his call-and-response team.

Redding’s songs were usually either slow ballads or stompers. Two of his finest ballads were “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” the B side of “Mr. Pitiful,” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” cowritten with the Impressions’ Jerry Butler.

The archetypal stomper was “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” which probably started as a rip-off of the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” but ended up illustrating the difference between Redding and the Motown stable. Both he and James Brown had started out as Little Richard imitators, and both used lots of vocal interjections such as “Ha!” In terms of onstage physicality, Redding rocked circles around the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs and everyone else except Brown. He was almost as impassioned as Brown, though not as intricately graceful—more of a wild freight train shaking back and forth, manic and beaming (“Got to, got to keep a grip!”). Motown’s lead singers, such as David Ruffin, by contrast, were cool, slick—farther removed from the black gospel tradition, in which the preacher hollered, rough and raspy; and more sedate for white consumption as per Berry Gordy’s ambitions.

But as the 1960s progressed, the level of vocal distortion became the barometer of passion: the more the singer shredded his larynx, the more intensely soulful he was considered. Before the British Invasion, the Italian bel canto–style crooners (smooth and mellow) dominated white pop. But the Brits respected the “linen-ripping sound” of blues vocals, as Beatle producer George Martin called it.
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All the great Motown singers of the era had it in them, including Ruffin, Stubbs, Gaye, and Wonder—but it was the rise of the Stax soul singers such as Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam and Dave that pushed them to get rawer. For example, compare the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” to their hit “Bernadette,” released two years later.

These fierce soul belters were always pleading to their women, totally codependent, as Redding sings in “I’m Depending on You.” Redding just asked for a little “Respect,” the Four Tops couldn’t help being weak, Don Covay begged his woman to have “Mercy, Mercy,” the Temptations weren’t “too proud to beg.”

For
Otis Blue
, Redding’s second album of the year (after
The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads
), Redding started recording on Saturday, July 9, at 10:00 a.m. He took a break from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., to let Booker T. and the M.G.s play a gig, and then resumed recording until 2:00 p.m. Sunday. When Redding briefly left to take a physical for medical insurance, Cropper (who was also serving as producer) got the idea for him to cover the Stones’ new single. “I went up to the front of the record shop, got a copy of the record, played it for the band and wrote down the lyrics. You notice on ‘Satisfaction’ that Otis said, ‘fashion,’ not ‘faction.’ I love it. That’s what made him so unique. He’d just barrel right through that stuff, unaware of anything. He just didn’t know the song. He hadn’t heard it, as far as I know.”
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The Stones would later base their stage version on Redding’s cover. The Stones’ original version reached No. 19 on the R&B charts, while Redding took it to the R&B Top 5 and the pop Top 40.

The centerpiece of
Otis Blue
, “Respect,” was written in a day, arranged in twenty minutes, and recorded in one take. Redding was complaining about the way his wife was treating him after he had returned from a tour, and M.G.s drummer Al Jackson said, “What are you griping about? You’re on the road all the time. All you can look for is a little respect when you come home.”
13
Redding had originally written the tune as a ballad for his road manager, Speedo Sims, and Sims’s band, the Singing Demons, but after Jackson’s comment, he was inspired to speed up the tempo and change the words. Sims’s version didn’t work out, so Redding gave it a shot. The singer comes home and complains to his woman that he’s giving her all his money and just wants respect (and probably sex). Sims calls out, “Hey Hey Hey!” in the background.

“Respect” made it to No. 5 R&B. A week after it was released, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts blew up into one of the worst riots of the decade. But the track’s force as a possible civil rights protest song seemed to be overshadowed by the more dominant conflict between the man and woman at the heart of the lyrics. However, that conflict was what the
women’s
liberation movement was all about, so when Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler produced Aretha Franklin’s version two years later (in which she adds the “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” break and “sock it to me” repetitions), Redding’s words became the ultimate feminist anthem. At the Monterey Pop Festival, Redding introduced the song by smiling and saying, “This is a song that a girl took away from me, a good friend of mine, this girl she just took this song, but I’m still gonna do it anyway.”

“Coming to Stax literally changed my life,” Jerry Wexler said. He had been burned out recording in New York, and the Memphis studio reinvigorated him. “The idea of coming to a place [like Stax] where four guys came to work like four cabinetmakers or four plumbers and hang up their coats and start playing music in the morning, and then the beautifully crafted records came out of this! God, can I get some of this, ’cause this is the way to go.”
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Wexler brought Wilson Pickett to Stax in May, to cowrite with Steve Cropper. As they were coming up with “In the Midnight Hour,” Wexler demonstrated a new dance the kids were doing up north called the Jerk. It inspired a new beat that would come to define all the Stax records to follow, in which Stax drummers would ever so subtly delay the backbeat—the
two
and the
four
.

Stax’s beat, bass sound, and cowbell made the Beatles want to come there to record, but McCartney said Stax asked for too much money and “were obviously trying to take us for a ride, because we were the Beatles.”
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More Pickett hits, such as “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)” were recorded that year. To the casual listener, Pickett sounded very similar to Redding, especially since they used the same band, studio, and cowriter Steve Cropper. But live, clapping and swaying with his blindingly white smile, Pickett grooved a little less frantically than Redding did.

Sam Moore and Dave Prater met on the southern gospel circuit and teamed up as Sam and Dave. Sam was the tenor (higher pitched) and Dave the baritone (lower pitched), and they’d trade lines back and forth. Wexler found them in Miami and brought them to Stax, where they were paired with the songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter. Their hit “I Take What I Want” was inspired by the name of a story in
Bronze Thrills
, a confessional magazine,
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and took the opposite approach of most pleading soul man stances: they were just going to pick up the girl and carry her away. Next, Hayes and Porter took the melody and opening lines from the gospel song “You Don’t Know What the Lord Has Done for Me” to make “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” about what their woman has done for them. Hayes and Porter made Sam sing at the top of his range, which angered him, because it was hard to do; but he did it.
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It was the same trick that Holland-Dozier-Holland used to get intense performances out of Levi Stubbs.

Porter studied Motown songs such as the Temptations’ October release, “Don’t Look Back,” written by Smokey Robinson (and perhaps inspired by Dylan’s line in “She Belongs to Me”). As Rob Bowman writes in
Soulsville, U.S.A.
, “He deduced that they all had an opening that laid out the scenario, followed that with a bit of action, and then some sort of denouement. All were in the first person, and none of them ended with a complete resolution. ‘All of the songs followed that formula,’ smiles Porter. ‘I knew right then. I said, “Hey, we’re gonna be some bad dudes in this music industry.” That’s when the thought processes really started working and an identity started taking place.’”
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Sam and Dave were the template for John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s Blues Brothers duo. Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Stax drummer Willie Hall joined the Blues Brothers’ band, and Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose” became their theme.

*   *   *

The year was a rich
one for artists unaffiliated with big labels as well. In LA, Sonny Bono hooked Lawrence Darrow Brown up with a small label called Stripe Records, which renamed him Dobie Gray, after the title character in the TV show
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
Gray’s clubbing anthem, “The ‘In’ Crowd,” was quickly followed by “See You at the Go-Go,” in which he is backed by the Wrecking Crew.

St. Louis’s Little Milton sang of life-and-death matters in “We’re Gonna Make It,” which topped the R&B charts in May and became a civil rights anthem. Milton sings to his woman that they may not be able to pay the rent or the heating bill amid the roaches, and they may have to go to the welfare line so they can afford beans, but they have each other, so they’re gonna make it. Milton’s protagonist even considers begging with a sign reading, “Help the deaf, dumb, and blind.”

Chicago’s Curtis Mayfield released his most explicit civil rights single yet, with “Meeting Over Yonder.” With its rousing falsettos, it was in a long tradition of “meeting songs”—anything from a church meeting to a union meeting. On the pop side, the Impressions’ exquisite “You’re Cheatin’” took the riff of the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself” and transposed it to strings. “Woman’s Got Soul” is a laid-back ode in the mode of the Temptations’ “The Girl’s Alright with Me.”

And then there was the most independent of them all—Mr. Dynamite, Soul Brother No. 1, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, the Godfather of Soul—James Brown.

*   *   *

Bob Dylan and the Animals
may have sung about a gambling den/brothel in their versions of “The House of the Risin’/Rising Sun,” but Brown was raised in one. In his autobiography, he writes of his aunt’s roadhouse, “We were just trying to survive. That’s what everything that went on in that house—gambling, bootlegging, prostitution—was about: survival. Some people call it crime, I call it survival. It’s the same thing goes on right today in the ghetto.”
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Born in 1933 of African, Chinese, and Apache descent, Brown was abandoned by both parents. As a child, he shined shoes and danced for the soldiers coming through town on their way to World War II; picked cotton; boxed. In the roadhouse, the bluesman Tampa Red taught him some guitar. From the preachers, Brown learned how to drop to his knees screaming.

If he had been a superhero, his origin scene might be when three white men tried to electrocute him. He was draining a ditch for them when an electric air compressor/pump fell into the water where he was working. They told him to turn it on:

“Nosir,” I said. “I don’t want to.”

“Goddammit, boy, I said cut it on!”

I stepped in the water and turned it on. When I did, it felt like a whole herd of horses was galloping over me. I couldn’t let go of the tank; the electricity froze me to it. Junior [Brown’s cousin] was jumping around and yelling, “Turn it off, turn it off!” But the men stood there, grinning. Junior ran into the filling station and got the man we were working for. He came running, and when he saw what was happening he pulled the plug. I collapsed, and Junior dragged me under a tree. When I came to, I just glared at the fella who’d told me to turn on the tank, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare. The amazing thing is that when I recovered, we went back to work. I don’t know why I wasn’t killed, but I decided from that day on I’d never take any mess like that again. There were still a lot of lynchings around Georgia and South Carolina in those days
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 … Later, I used to walk down the street with my first wife in Toccoa, Georgia, and smile a crocodile grin and just
pray
that the white man didn’t come up and mess with me like he messed with them other people. “Lord, don’t let it happen,” I’d say. Because if it did, I knew I was going to kill the man.
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He did time in juvenile detention and then prison for robbery. When he got out in 1952, he joined a gospel group and then rose to be one of Little Richard’s greatest rivals. By the mid-1960s he was older than most of the soul singers but determined to top them all with his leopard’s shriek and unparalleled footwork. His legs were always moving, gliding, sliding, shimmying, spinning, splitting—“boogying as if on an invisible Travelator (two decades before Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk),” as journalist Philip Norman put it.

Brown’s forty- to fifty-person revue and all its equipment traveled in one bus and one truck, and he worked five or six nights a week.
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He would send his interior designer ahead to prep his hotel room for him. His pompadour was done in the morning, done again before the show, and then redone after the show. He thought hair and teeth were the most important things. “If your hair ain’t right, something wrong with you. Gotta keep your hair right! Understand?”
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His stage act was worked out down to the second. The band was fined a hundred dollars for missing cues or not shining their shoes properly. (Brown used to shine shoes, after all.)