Otis Redding Live (Part 1)

I discovered Otis Redding in the summer of ‘69 sitting in a darkened theater in Burlington VT watching D.A. Pennebaker’s classic film Monterey Pop. The film has many highlights but the Otis sequence is one of the film’s (and concert’s) best moments. 40 years later there is no better way to experience Otis. The Criterion Collection version is a boxed set containing a disk of the film in DTS sound, an incredible outtakes disk with the bands not making the final cut and a separate disk for the complete Hendrix and Otis performances http://www.dvdjournal.com/reviews/c/completemontereypop_cc.shtml. The audio for the latter two was released on vinyl in 1970, unintentionally coinciding with Hendrix’s own untimely death. The record was a must have for Hendrix fans with only a tiny amount of live Hendrix released at that point. For many of these fans, the Otis side was an unexpected and revelatory bonus.

The Otis performance at Monterey is considered his most important if not his best – an essential crossover moment that blew away a mostly young white audience. In 6 months Otis would be dead at 26 when his tour plane crashed into a cold Wisconsin lake. His biggest hit, Sitting on the Dock in the Bay, would be released soon after. Aside from Otis’s raw talent and charisma, the Monterey footage is an amazing example of how tight the MG’s were as a band and the Mar-Keys as a horn section. With Otis, they were firing on all cylinders when they ended the second night of the festival at 1AM, in the rain, on June 18th 1967.

At Monterey most of the sets were brief due to the shear number of performers an Booker T used the abbreviated version of Otis’s standard tour set- Shake, Respect, I’ve been Lovin’ You To Long, Satisfaction and Try a Little Tenderness. Get the DVD and watch this, preferably in 5 channel sound played loud. When Otis hits the stage with Shake you can tell right away this is going to be something. As Otis dances, directs the band and shouts the vocal the joy on his face is genuine. The band is perfectly in synch. Two songs later when they slow things down with I’ve Been Lovin’ You To Long, something magical happens. At the beginning of the third verse, the cord changes slightly (to a minor key?) and Otis creates a transcending moment becoming a supplicant, throwing a career’s worth of love and appreciation into the final verse. This moves me to tears whenever I hear it. The crowd is riveted now. After an intense Satisfaction Otis dedicates the final song to “all those mini-skirts out there.” Unfortunately for the film, Pennebaker must have run out of film as he instead shows a collage of pretty girl moments from over the 3 day event while Otis and the MG’s are building to the ultimate climax. At the very end the camera is finally on Otis and we can watch him go off and come back for another few bars and say goodbye to the audience. Try a Little Tenderness, the closer and Otis’s best song and possibly best performance ends up unexplicably unfilmed until the very end. Thankfully we have the audio. If you can’t find the 4 cd Monterey box with the full Otis set the 2 cd version is on iTunes (but with only two Otis songs). To find Try a Little Tenderness from Monterey, it is the final song on the Otis Box, also found on iTunes. Attached is the clip of the third song. But you really should see this in color with surround sound.