Monterey Pop, five months before the crash
Monterey, Saturday night into Sunday morning, 17 June 1967. The festival had already shown the rock audience its own mirror: Jefferson Airplane, electric Dylan’s children, flowers on the banner. Then the gear changed. Booker T. and the M.G.’s set up, Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Al Jackson Jr., with the Mar-Keys’ horns, and Otis Redding walked into a crowd that was not his usual Saturday night. He was twenty-five. He had five months left. Nobody in the bowl knew the second fact. He seems to have known the first: about twenty minutes to become undeniable to people who had come for other names.
He did not ease them in. Shake hit like a door. Respect was still more his song that summer than anyone else’s, even if Aretha Franklin’s version was already in the air. Then he slowed it on purpose and talked. Robert Christgau, in the audience, wrote the lines down. This is the love crowd, right? We all love each other, don’t we? The field said yeah, because that is what a field does when a man that size asks. Then I’ve Been Loving You Too Long: Cropper barely touching the guitar, the horns arriving late and huge, Redding begging a verse that is really a negotiation. Can you do that one more time. Down on my knees. The love crowd, which had been a slogan on a banner, became a sound.
He also took the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and sang it as if Jagger had been renting it. Try a Little Tenderness closed the set. D. A. Pennebaker’s cameras, which would lock the performance into the film Monterey Pop, keep losing him and finding him. You cannot hold a singer who is using his whole body as punctuation. Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead said later he was pretty sure he had seen God on that stage. The line is too large. The performance supports the excess.
This is the love crowd, right? We all love each other, don’t we? Am I right? Let me hear you say yeah.
(Otis Redding, Monterey Pop, 1967)
On 10 December 1967 a plane went into a Wisconsin lake and Redding was gone, days after (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay had been cut at Stax. Monterey is the last great public room he had. It is also the moment soul music stopped being a novelty the rock press could file under R&B. The white festival did not discover him. He was already a star on the chitlin’ circuit and the charts. What the festival did was run out of adjectives in front of witnesses who wrote for magazines.
Put the gown, the spaceship and the moonwalk aside. This one is a man in a dark suit, sweating, asking a strange crowd to admit it loves somebody, then not letting the admission stay cheap. The yeah is easy. The song after the yeah is the concert. It still sounds like a person refusing to stop.
