‘Dock of the Bay’ still resonates 50 years later
Dap-Kings.
“Dock of the Bay” emerged from a period of Redding’s life when he was going through dramatic transitions; had he lived, it might well have been remembered as the beginning of the second half of his career.
In early 1967, Redding had made a name as the biggest star on the Stax label and the author of “Respect,” a song commandeered by Aretha Franklin. He was also famed for his electrifying performances, which were expanding beyond the R&B circuit.
Grace Slick, the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, saw him at the Fillmore West in San Francisco in 1966. “It was the most stunning performance I had seen up to that point,” she said in a phone interview from Malibu, California. She remembered the stage swaying as he moved around it: “I’d never seen anybody with that much positive thrust, for lack of a better term.”
The next summer, Redding delivered a barnburner set at the Monterey Pop Festival in California. “This was the ‘love crowd,”’ record producer and Monterey organizer Lou Adler said in a phone interview.
“He was aware of what he was getting into but had no idea of what the response would be. As much as the performer gave at Monterey, the audience gave it right back.”
Zelma Redding, the singer’s widow, said that after her husband had flown from the festival to their ranch in Macon, Georgia, he told her, “I got a new audience.”
Redding threw himself into the project of reinventing himself.
“It was clear that his bread and butter, which was these big (time signature) ballads, had plateaued,” Jonathan Gould, the author of the recent biography “Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life,” said in an interview. “He had done what he could do with them, which was more than anybody else could do.”
Like most of the world, Redding spent the summer of 1967 listening to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
“He thought it was the greatest thing he ever heard,” Redding said, speaking from her office in Georgia. “I guess he was thinking about, ‘How can I be this creative?’”
In August 1967, Redding returned to San Francisco for a week of shows at the jazz club Basin Street West. When he was besieged by female fans at his hotel, promoter Bill Graham let him stay at his houseboat in Sausalito.
Redding spent his days quietly looking at the water; freed from the usual demands of travel, he could relax and write songs. His road manager, Earl Sims (known as Speedo), said he was the only witness the day Redding picked up his guitar and wrote a new song that began “Sittin’ in the morning sun / I’ll be sittin’ when the evening comes.”
Sims was used to tapping out a simple beat when his boss was writing songs, acting as a human metronome. The rhythm of this new one was totally different, he said in an interview.
“It took me a minute to get into what he was doing. He was away, and he was on the water, and he was relaxed. That’s why he started that song.”
Steve Cropper, who regularly backed up Redding as the guitarist for Booker T. and the MG’s (aka the Stax house band), remembered Redding calling him from the airport in Memphis, Tennessee, to make sure he was at the studio. When Redding arrived, the pair sat on beige folding chairs, hammering out the song.
“I helped him with the second verse a little bit, helped him with the bridge,” Cropper said in a phone interview. “After he sang, ‘I watch the ships roll in, watch them roll out again,’ I said, ‘Have you thought that if a ship rolls, it’s going to take on water and sink?”’ Redding told him, “That’s the way I want it, Crop.”
The duo went into the studio in November, joined by Donald Dunn (known as Duck) on bass, Al Jackson on drums, Booker T. Jones on piano and three horn players. In an interview, Jones remembered the sessions as having “kind of a hectic feeling — so much so that I remember a number of people sleeping over at the studio.”
Different lines of the song resonate with those who have covered it through the years. Michael Bolton recorded the secondmost-successful version of the track (a No. 11 hit in 1988). In an email, he said he thinks the song’s key lyric is “look like nothing’s gonna change, everything remains the same.”
“It states the obvious lack of our evolution as a society,” he wrote.
Jones agreed that line has a special power. “It’s one of those lyrics that has the capability of touching anyone who’s been through changes, loneliness, trying to find a secure place in the world,” he said.
During the past 50 years, that’s proved to be just about everyone.