Otis Redding by Jonathan Gould

Author:Jonathan Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Otis with James Brown: “hair and teeth”

During the period when Otis toured with him, Brown was beginning to assert this same sense of fierce proprietorship over his business affairs. Early in 1964, flush with the success of his Live at the Apollo album, he walked away from his contract with King Records, formed his own label (which he pointedly named Fair Deal), and signed a distribution agreement with Mercury. The ensuing litigation between King and Mercury would drag on for more than a year, during which Brown was constrained from releasing any more records under his own name. But the lifeblood of Brown’s operation had always been his nonstop schedule of live shows, which was overseen with a kind of military precision by his manager, Ben Bart. Like Otis, Brown had a white manager with whom he was very close, although Bart was more of a Joe Galkin than a Phil Walden: a hard-nosed Jew from Brooklyn who had founded Universal Attractions in the 1940s and built it into one of the top black talent agencies in the country. Universal had many clients, but Bart’s relationship with “Jimmy” (as he alone called Brown) was unique—so much so that in 1962 he turned the agency over to his son and began working full-time as Brown’s manager. Together, they perfected an innovative system by which Brown co-promoted his own shows, usually in collaboration with local black disk jockeys, who repaid Brown for their piece of the action by playing his records and advertising his appearances on the air. From his seat on the tour bus, Otis got to observe the nuts and bolts of this operation, beginning with the way Brown “took care of” the deejays, program directors, record distributors, and anyone else who was in a position to do him some good. Brown’s business sense, his grasp of what he called “big-city thinking,” and his ability to command respect were a special source of inspiration for Otis, who recognized that, under the cosmetic gloss, Brown was even more “country” than he was, and as lacking in personal charm as a man could possibly be.

By the middle of May, the weak sales of “Come to Me” had run their course. Otis had been singing “Security” on tour with James Brown (who liked the song so much that he recorded his own version of it called “Out of the Blue”), so Jim Stewart relented and released the track as a single. It would go on to sell around 100,000 copies over the next four months, but the record failed to get much airplay outside of the South. Along with the rest of the American music business, Atlantic Records was still reeling from the shock wave of Beatlemania, and the label’s executives and promo men had more pressing matters to deal with than Otis Redding’s latest single.

Inspired by the experience of performing on a nightly basis with the backing of a first-rate band, Otis returned to Macon determined to form a group of his own.

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