Since I Lost My Baby: Soul Man (Excerpt)

He was earthy and raw, as big and powerful as the V8 engine on a Cadillac Eldorado. He could out-plead and out-rasp David Ruffin, and there was something about the gruffness in Otis Redding’s voice that brought out the woman in me like no smooth slickster from Motown ever had. On stage he worked himself into a magnetic frenzy, but Otis didn’t lose control or need the mop-up crew like James Brown. There were no Famous Flames to cape, carry and console him, even though his desperation-ridden “Ple-eeze... ple-eeze... ple-hee-hee-heeze...” tore your heart out. There were just the horn players—egging him on, punctuating his stricken body on “I Been Loving You Too Long” and heaving their mournful sighs on “Pain in My Heart.” He roughed up “My Girl,” and may have sent the Temps in their shiny suits fleeing for cover with his chaotic stuttering “Got to... got to... got to...” in the vamp. Otis plowed his way through every song with full force and came out smiling from a heart as big and bright as the Georgia sun.

And all of that propelled me toward the next place that soul music would take root in my life—a place where strong gruff men would articulate the growing well of hurt in my soul and provide the perfect antithesis to my blossoming womanhood. It was the Summer of Love, I was seventeen years old, and I was discovering The Blues. So when I heard that Otis Redding was going to appear at a big festival that June, I had to go. His concert at Monterey Pop, as history would document, was the undisputed transformative moment of Otis Redding’s career, just as James Brown’s performance at the T.A.M.I. show had been for him.

None of us there in Monterey had any idea of how privileged we were to experience this phenomenal old soul of so few years; Otis was only twenty-five. That night, Otis Redding bridged the gap between the broken-hearted blues of black folks and the starry-eyed abandon of the flower children. No one imagined we were about to lose him, just a few months later, when his plane plunged into a Wisconsin lake two weeks before Christmas.

 The 1967 Monterey Pop Festival was a unique and profound moment of history that wove together a diverse group of people into a remarkable tapestry of peace and love. The audience ran the gamut from shorthairs and paisley mod-types to hippie potheads and fresh-faced flower children with no underwear. Mine was a generation in transition. There were no bad trips, no uprisings, no baton-wielding enforcers, no angry epithet-spouting herds. That would come the next summer in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. And the summer after that—the same week as Woodstock—it would all come to an end on the orders of Charles Manson.

But for that one sweet weekend, straights and stoners, mods and hippies, even cops and counterculturists got happily and peacefully along with one another (and drugs). Before any of us realized the hellish turn things would take, we abandoned all the rules with awe and wonder, calling it freedom. That and The Music fused us into a force which, for better or worse, would overwhelm the next decade and change the world.

Excerpted from SINCE I LOST MY BABY: A MEMOIR OF TEMPTATIONS, TROUBLE & TRUTH Copyright 2020 Selimah Nemoy . (OG Press) . All Rights Reserved

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