BOOKS
The immortal soul man finally gets an epic biography. By Kris Needs.
Otis gets Respect from substantial Reddings-assisted biography.
Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life Jonathan Gould CROWN ARCHETYPE. 19.99
This December will mark 50 years since the fatal plane crash that claimed the life of Otis Redding and most of his touring band. Many still believe he was the greatest soul man ever, but like contemporaries Wilson Pickett and Curtis Mayfield, Redding has waited decades for a comprehensive biography. Over six years in creation and nearly 500 pages long, author Jonathan Gould now vividly brings to life the man Stax Records boss Jim Stewart called “a walking inspiration”. Previously, winning the trust of Otis’s widow Zelma had been a stumbling block to several authors gaining the fullest access to all elements of the story. Gould has had no such impediment. Zelma and Otis’s eldest sister Louise welcomed him to the family home in Macon GA, and his exhaustive research started with a local mayor showing him the ruined shack in rural Georgia where Otis may have been born in 1941. He then interviewed scores of family members, school friends, teachers, band colleagues and contemporaries, building rich insights into Redding’s life and times, along with key influences Sam Cooke, Little Richard and Ray Charles. The book starts at June 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival, where Otis became an unexpected smash hit, movie highlight and first soul man to be embraced by the white mainstream masses. Gould then painstakingly details the Redding family’s slave-to-sharecropping lineage against courageous civil rights activism and brutal segregation, before moving to Macon when Otis was three. After rebellious school days, gospel beginnings and first recording forays, Otis famously sneaked These Arms Of Mine into an August 1962 Stax recording session by guitarist Johnny Jenkins. Therein, his recordings are covered with a rare critical insight that can dissect his faltering performance of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come but eulogise the torrential power of I Can’t Turn You Loose. Otis emerges as a fiercely ambitious workaholic who made friends easily and never moved from his home city. After leading the Stax-Volt Revue to Europe in ’67, which reaffirmed soul as a vital musical movement, he underwent throat surgery, then, during weeks of recovery spent immersed in The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, explored a maturer kind of songwriting
“OTIS REDUCED HUMAN EMOTION TO ITS ABSOLUTE ESSENCE.”
that produced the gently reflective (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay. His million-selling epitaph, the soul classic announced, along with other posthumously released songs, the full potential of his mellower new phase. Otis’s death is chillingly described with help from a local pilot, who pinpoints what went wrong in the two-engine plane that stalled in freezing fog over Wisconsin’s Lake Monona. The tragedy seemed to usher in the darkness that replaced 1967’s short-lived optimism; although others picked up Otis’s torch, nobody could fill his giant foot-print. As the book’s title suggests, he was only just getting started. “Otis was soul music’s greatest apostle of devotion,” maintains Gould. “Otis’s special distinction turned on his desire to have and to hold. He sang of yearning and tenderness, of security and respect…He had the capacity to reduce human emotion to its absolute essence.” From his supreme triumphs to his one last heart-breaking phone-call to Zelma, devotees and soul scholars alike could not wish for a more thorough and sensitive portrait.