Otis Redding(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay:
Otis Redding’s Loneliness and My Own
By
Jonah Raskin
How lonely was the legendary
singer/songwriter Otis Redding, dubbed “the King of Soul,” who died at the age
of 25? Was he as lonely in Sausalito, California as I feel here in Ocean Beach
on La Playa Street in a one-bedroom apartment a minute from the surf? How do
you measure loneliness, anyway, I wonder? Surely, not by the ounce, the quart,
the inch or the mile, but rather by some inexact and incalculable yardstick
that plummets the depths of one’s psyche. Loneliness, aka the Blues, belongs to
the human condition and isn’t limited by time and space, though circumstances,
like Covid, can augment it. Still, at the height of the pandemic, I was happy
in my own rented little room in Cotati, California, where I wrote a novel set
in San Francisco in 1955. I was alone but not lonely. The characters talked to
me and I talked to them. We kept one another company.
If you’re a Redding fan, you might
remember that he died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967, just days after he
made the second recording, on December 7, 1967, of his signature song,
(“Sittin’ Here) On the Dock of the Bay.” The first session took place on
November 22. It lasts just two minutes and 38 seconds, and became the first
ever posthumous single to top the charts in the US. “Dock of the Bay” made Redding
both beloved and immortal. It’s my go-to song when I want to hear the sounds of
loneliness and remember that I’m not alone.
Psychologists and sociologists tell
us over and over again in books like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City,
that loneliness has hit epidemic proportions globally. Like other loneliness
mavens, Laing describes how to practise “the art of being alone.” I’m
just beginning to learn the basics. What’s essential to nip the Blues in the
bud, at least for me, is to get out of bed when I wake and go about my day, not
lollygag, which makes matters worse.
My longtime friend, Sarah Baker, a
lyricist and piano player, tells me that she often feels isolated and lonely,
even in a crowd. Her blues make her an excellent interpreter of the Blues, which
is often music for and about Blues people. “I'd take ‘Dock of the Bay’ with me
on a desert island,” Baker tells me.
In an article published recently in
Street Spirit, journalist and photographer, Martha Cast, writes eloquently
about “the loneliness of living unsheltered” in the Bay Area. Redding
himself would understand. He wasn’t homeless, but he wrote an early draft of
“Dock of the Bay” when he was living by himself on a houseboat in Sausalito,
shortly after his history-making performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, the
previous summer— “The Summer of Love,” when no one was supposed to be lonely.
According to Wikipedia, Redding
continued to “scribble lines of the song on napkins and hotel paper” after he
left Sausalito, went on the road and performed before appreciative audiences.
With help from guitarist and producer Steve Crooper, he finished it in Memphis,
a city notable for the Blues, far from San Francisco Bay. The sounds of
seagulls and the ocean were added to the song in the studio, along with whistling
by the singer himself.
Listen to “The Dock of the Bay” and
you’ll likely conclude that the song, which was released on January 8, 1968,
captures, perhaps not the essence of everyone’s loneliness,
but common denominators shared by many lonely souls: a sense of hopelessness
and even despair. All together, the mix of words, images (“the dock of the
bay,”and “resting my bones”)—plus the tune itself and Redding’s voice—express
emotional pain that can amplify one’s own loneliness.
And also release it. Called “a lonely
lament,” it has helped listeners accept pain and suffering, find inner peace
and move on. So Redding’s fans say on a BBC program devoted to (“Sittin’ On)
The Dock of the Bay,” its birth, origins, reception and meanings.*
If Redding could make art from his
own sorrow and sense of living on the edge, then others can likely do the
same.
In “The Dock of the Bay,” Redding is
homesick. So am I. A year ago, I left Sonoma County, where I had lived for 40
years and moved to the city, not far away in terms of miles, but it has felt
like culture shock. There, I belonged to a community of poets and farmers, and
felt connected to the earth itself. Here, in the city, I'm not literally on the
dock of the Bay, but rather on the edge of the city in a foggy, chilly
neighborhood that, by virtue of its geography and topography, can feel like it
breeds loneliness and isolation. Friends from Sonoma who visit tell me
Ocean Beach is “the end of the world.”
Redding explains in his lament that
he has roamed thousands of miles, before his arrival in San Francisco. (He
calls it “Frisco”). He sits by himself on the water's edge, watches the rising
and the setting of the sun, the tides that roll in and roll out and the ships
that come and go. (In 1967, SF was still an active port). The rhythms of nature
and the cycles of shipping don’t alleviate his suffering.
Redding says he has “nothin’to live
for,” that “nothing is gonna change” and that he’s not going to change, though
people tell him what to do. Loneliness is a constant companion. In that sense,
ironically, he’s never really alone. I know those feelings and try not to allow
them to overwhelm me, though they seem to have overwhelmed Redding when he
wrote his quintessential loneliness lament. Still, at the end of 1967 and the
start of 1968, he was on the cusp of success and fame. “(Sittin’ On) the Dock
of the Bay” propelled his career like no other song he sang and recorded. From
the ashes of his own anguish, he created beauty.
For all my sense of loneliness and
isolation, I do feel connected in Ocean Beach to my neighborhood bar,
bookstore, library, café, organic grocery store and to family members who live
near-by. The N Judah is two minutes on foot from my front door and takes me far
and wide. Still, connections have not totally eliminated the existential sense
of loneliness that weighs down on me, especially when I wake in the morning.
Another often-played song about
loneliness, is the Beatles “Eleanor Rigby,” a double A-side single, also on the
1966 album “Revolver,” and written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. With
characters like Father McKenzie, who writes sermons no one hears, and Eleanor
Rigby who picks up the rice at a church wedding, but who will never marry, the
song delivers a distinctive British take on loneliness. Lennon and McCarthy
returned to the loneliness theme in “A Day in the Life,” which is on Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in which a nameless young man blows his
brains out.
Was there something about that time
in the mid-1960s that led the Beatles and Otis Redding to explore loneliness?
Smokey Robinson recorded his own loneliness song, “The Tears of a Clown,” in
1967. Tony Richardson’s movie, The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner was released in the US in 1962, and spoke to and for far more
than marathon runners and the “angry young men.”
The mid-1960s was a lonely time for
me as a student living in Manchester, England, a long way from my own family
and in a culture and society not my own. I was in my mid-20s, nearly 60 years
younger than I am now. Back then, I got through the loneliness and the Blues by
reading and writing, attending classes at the University of Manchester,
listening to the BBC and Dylan on my little record player, making friends with
fellow students and carousing with them at a pub near the campus.
Today, my salvation lies in part with
new found friends and family, and also by walking alone on Ocean Beach with
other solitary walkers, and, like Otis Redding listening to the tide come in
and go out again.
*Sittin'
On The Dock of the Bay was written while Otis Redding was reflecting on his
life on Sausalito Bay in California in the summer of 1967. Its upbeat, laidback
melody belies the loneliness of the lyrics. Just a few months later Otis
Redding was killed in a plane crash and the song was released, becoming the
first posthumous number 1 record in the US. His musician contemporaries
including Booker T Jones and guitarist Steve Cropper, who co-wrote Dock of the
Bay, tell the story of the song's genesis, and people in their twenties to
their seventies reveal why they relate it to dramatic periods in their lives. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000dgxx
Dear Nibir,
This is not a personal email, but it is a personal essay that explores how I am these days.
Love, Jonah
