To set the scene of the man who was on the stage: It’s early April 1966, and for three days, Otis Redding is in residence at Los Angeles’s Whisky A Go Go. He is far from his Chitlin’ Circuit base back in the South, playing a club that would be at the epicenter of rock’s psychedelic movement, where Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, and the Doors performed some of their most unhinged sets. Redding will be dead in less than two years, killed when his tour plane crashed. Here at the Whisky A Go Go, he is 24.
Unlike jazz, rock tends to be stingy with its archival releases. That is, we may get a live album, scooped together from a run of performances or featuring one concert. But it’s rare that a release like this package hits the market, where an entire residency of shows is documented.
At the time, sets were the norm: Someone like Otis Redding came out and played a truncated first program, followed by a longer one a little later, and sometimes a third. The “house” would, for the most part, carry over— these L.A.-based music buffs were hard into live performance—and you could hear how a set list would change, how numbers would be handled differently, what adjustments the band might make, how a singer like Redding would choose to dish out his energy from one set to the next.
The thinking was that no one could expend total energy across the whole of two performances. But Otis Redding, as we hear now, was not other people: “We’re going to do that song again to make sure we got it on tape,” he says during the second set on opening night (April 8), before an undertaking of “Good to Me”—which he and his band have already played twice. The aim was to get a single-disc, in-concert album from these gigs, in part because this was a listening crowd, rather than the frantic ones, typical of Redding shows. There is the usual call-and-response between singer and audience, but these people clearly want to hear what the singer can do.
Redding wrests meaning from the different versions of “Good to Me” by approaching the song in various ways: as a smoldering rhythm-and-blues number, a torch ballad, the expirate of a lover’s under-the-covers plea. It’s a more extemporaneous approach than you might associate with a soul singer, but it also acts as a reminder that Otis Redding was one of his decade’s finest singers, period. His range wasn’t extreme, but as Arthur Alexander was to rhythm-and-blues, Redding was to soul: a force of nature that nature itself would heed, with a rare ability to blend power and vulnerability.
He retools “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which closes five of the seven sets. The Rolling Stones channeled their love of soul horns into an outsized guitar riff that sounded bigger and wilder than any guitar riff could be. Redding had his band encase the groove in the bass drum and bass guitar, with the horns serving (brilliantly) as the rhythm section. James Brown had this kind of gift for arranging, one not normally associated with Otis Redding. But when you hear him work here you realize that this was a peerless soul auteur. There are the stomping swingers—”Mr. Pitiful,” “These Arms of Mine”—but also multiple versions of a soul pastoral like “Just One More Day,” which mixes Redding’s standard medium with elements of folk music.
Having famously remarked that Aretha Franklin took his song from him with her cover of “Respect,” here the composer serves up one corkscrewing version after another. Each take is so masterful, so rammed with breathless tension and release, that the performance becomes evanescent—well, almost—for a spell. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that a powerhouse like Redding wouldn’t always keep going. Listening to him, you’re conscious of a musical force that’s more than a man with a band. You know it when you hear it—and you know it over and over again, in this collection, in that classic can’t-stop/won’t stop style.
Colin Fleming is the author of Between Cloud and Horizon: A Relationship Casebook in Stories.