Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” spent four weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 starting in March 1968, but Redding never knew it: He died in a plane crash Dec. 10, 1967. He was 26.
Redding recorded the song just days before. His friend, guitarist and producer Steve Cropper, 76, tells The Post how excited Redding was when he called him.
“I’ve got a hit,” Redding said. “I’m bringing it right now.”
As Cropper recalls it, Redding ran into Stax, their Memphis, Tenn., recording studio, saying, “Cropper, get your guh-tar.” And then he sang some of the introspective lyrics he’d written during a stay at promoter Bill Graham’s boathouse in Sausalito, Calif.
They finished the song in about an hour that Wednesday, but felt something was missing. Cropper suggested they get the Staple Singers to sing backup, and Redding was excited. He flew to Georgia to see his wife and children and returned on Friday, to check on Cropper’s progress.
“He popped his head into the control room and said, ‘I’ll see you on Monday,’” says Cropper.
Soon after, Redding and the Bar-Kays, a group of Memphis kids just out of high school who were his backup band, flew to Cleveland to perform on an “American Bandstand”-like show called “Upbeat.”
Mitch Ryder, frontman for the Detroit Wheels, performed “Knock on Wood” with Redding, an experience he tells The Post he’ll never forget.
“What impressed me was his actual physical size,” says Ryder, 72. “He put his arm on my shoulder during the song, and was holding me close. He’s rocking back and forth, and every time he rocks, my foot comes up.”
After the show, Ryder drove home to Detroit, “beaming the whole three-hour trip.”
Redding played three shows that Saturday night at Leo’s Casino in Cleveland. On Sunday, he and five members of the Bar-Kays took off for the short flight to Madison, Wis., to play a gig. They never made it. In cold, foggy and icy conditions, the plane plummeted into Lake Monona, three miles from shore. Trumpet player Ben Cauley was the only survivor.
Cropper was at the airport in Indianapolis with Booker T & the MGs, who were trying to get back to Memphis after a show. Singer David Porter called his wife to let her know they’d missed their connection.
As Cropper recalls it, Porter came back to them looking grim. “‘My wife just said Otis went down in a plane this morning and is dead,’” Cropper recalls him saying. “Everybody was just drained.”
Later, Cauley, who died in 2015, told Cropper that he remembered holding onto a pillow and spinning: “He said he was pulled from the water by some guys and he could hear the other band members screaming for help.”
When Redding’s body was found the next day, he was still strapped into his seat.
After Cropper returned to the recording studio, he got a call from New York asking what he had ready from Otis. He worked on finishing “Dock of the Bay” from Tuesday into Wednesday. “I handed the masters to a flight attendant at the airport, and that plane flew into LaGuardia, where she handed it to a rep from Atlantic, who took it straight to the record-pressing plant,” says Cropper. “He had records out in a few days.”
It was officially released in early 1968, but radio stations were playing the song by Christmas.
Back in Wisconsin, at the Factory, where Redding and the Bar-Kays had been scheduled to play, the opening act on the bill was a band called the Grim Reapers.