I'd love to say that I came across this song on the radio, or just on one of the many Otis Redding best-of CDs, but most likely I discovered this song the same way a lot of you did, if you're a child of the Eighties. That penultimate scene in Pretty In Pink, when Jon Cryer's Duckie is lip-synching to the last part while subsequently having a grand mal seizure in the record store where his lady love Molly Ringwald works? Yep, that was where I first heard this tune.
I've gone on a little bit about cultural appropriation in some of theses, but I'll say it again: white folks be stealing from the brothers. Actually, though, in this case Redding wasn't the original author of the song (it's from the early Thirties, and according to Wikipedia Bing Crosby took a turn at it, though it's safe to say his probably sounds nothing like Otis's). Hell, I heard it as an orchestral version at the beginning of Dr. Strangelove and wondered if I was hearing what I thought I was hearing. Otis Redding, of course, made the song his own.
Otis Redding is one of those guys who really, honestly, should have been around a lot longer. In the rock world, burning out before your time is up can be a good thing (as anyone who's had to endure a Sting solo record would attest...sorry, but it's just never gonna measure up to the Police), but some people really do depart way too soon, under incredibly tragic circumstances. I recently read Respect Yourself by Robert Gordon, a fantastic history of Stax Records, and Otis is a big presence in the early part of the book. I did not know, for instance, that when he auditioned for the record label he was the chauffeur for another singer who was auditioning that day, and on a whim he tried out his vocal chops. Think how differently music would have been had Otis not stepped up to the microphone that day.
His death in December 1967 (in a plane crash, along with most of the original members of the Bar-Keys) is reminiscent of Buddy Holly's crash almost a decade earlier. Both were stars on the rise, young and dynamic and ready to conquer the world. In rock-star terms, they were Icarus flying too close to the sun literally (or at least the crash of a comet that burned really bright for a short period of time). I was surprised when I learned that Otis was only twenty-six when he died; he always came across as older in his photos and on record. An old soul, perhaps.
Otis's death forever changed Stax, they managed to redefine themselves with Isaac Hayes stepping out from behind the producer's booth to become a recording star. The label thrived and then came crashing down (no doubt a fall fueled by resentment about the perception of it being black-owned in the mostly white Memphis business community). Stax fell itself, less than a decade after Otis Redding's last hurrah, but it's back. And the story of the label in its first incarnation is an amazing one, worth seeking out if you're a fan. It might have actually helped Otis more than hurt to have one of his signature covers (the other being his frantic take on the Stones' "Satisfaction") be associated with a skinny white dude in a John Hughes film, even if in the end Duckie does not get the girl (grand romantic gestures sometimes work, sometimes fail, but this one at least was memorable). In a lot of ways, the slow build of the song connects it to other slow-building songs, especially "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. Now, to me, the idea of "Stairway" being a classic rock song is ridiculous, and based solely on the release of the last few minutes of the song. The slow build makes the song torture for me, and I don't think it's a good song anyway. But "Try a Little Tenderness" works because of the slow build, it eases you into the eventual unleashing of Redding's soulful power. It's a fucking classic, I guess I'm saying.
I read an essay by Jonathan Lethem in which he described how Redding was studying the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album in his last months, trying to achieve something like that with his version of rock music (labeled "soul" because you can't just have music without genres, apparently). His posthumous hit "Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay" is suggestive of the direction he was going to go, had he lived. It's a loss that is assuaged somewhat by what we do have.
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