“One of the main things Otis told me in the car one day was, ‘I’m coming to Memphis and I’m going to get a place and you and I are going to produce and write songs.’ He really enjoyed being in the studio.” “Absolutely his style was changing,” Cropper tells Rolling Stone. Redding had produced (and co-written) Arthur Conley’s hit “Sweet Soul Music” earlier that year and Cropper says he started talking about getting off the road and spending more time producing in the studio. He had always relied on the emotion and energy in his vocals to carry his songs, but now he started paying more mind to the words themselves he’d also recorded most of his songs live in the studio, but the complex layering achieved by the Beatles and George Martin clued him in to other ways of building tracks. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band over and over. Redding had begun listening to Bob Dylan, whom he’d met at the Whisky in ’66 but beginning in June, the singer – like the rest of the world – was playing Sgt. It was the only time I told Otis what to do.” I suggested he write something folk-like, saying we could call it Soul Folk. “He saw a huge crowd of white kids going nuts over him, and he began to believe he could follow in the footsteps of Sam Cooke and Ray Charles.”Īl Bell, then a Stax executive, says that he told Redding he was getting pegged as a genre musician and “would have to come up with something different. “Monterey had a powerful effect on Otis,” recalls Stanley Booth, who interviewed Redding for the Saturday Evening Post during those final sessions.

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