1967 was a pretty rough year for Madison. Coined the “summer of our discontent” by Madison Magazine, by early December residents had already seen a pair of riots, a slew of racial tension and the deaths of 10 local men in Vietnam. But for as awful as all those things were, none of them stand out quite like Dec. 10, the day Otis Redding’s plane crashed into Lake Monona.
By all accounts, Redding was bound for superstardom. The 26-year-old soul singer had just wowed the crowds at the Monterey Pop Festival in June and was hard at work on a song called “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” Redding was convinced it was going to be a huge, career-defining hit. It was, but he wouldn’t live to see it.
“When he died, Otis was really on the verge of a major breakthrough in terms of his audience,” says Craig Werner, a professor of African-American Studies at UW-Madison and author of A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America. “Particularly when he had been at Monterey, he reached a much, much larger white audience than he ever had previously. And he’d done it without alienating his black audience.”Redding was something previously unseen in pop music: an unapologetically black artist with undeniable crossover appeal. In addition to his own soul standards, Redding flirted with rock music, covering songs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones on his studio albums. Essentially, he was a rock star, albeit one rooted in gospel and soul rather than, uh, “skiffle.”
And so, in the middle of a meteoric rise to fame, Redding and his band The Bar-Kays were scheduled to play two shows in Madison at The Factory, a club located at 315 W. Gotham Street (now A Room of One’s Own bookstore). They took off from Cleveland in Otis’ plane on the morning of Dec. 10, 1967 but crashed into a frigid Lake Monona just four miles from landing. The crash — the exact cause of which has never been determined — also claimed the lives of pilot Richard Fraser, valet Matthew Kelly, and Bar-Kays members Jimmy King, Phalon Jones, Ronnie Caldwell and Carl Cunningham. There was one survivor: trumpet player Ben Cauley, who died in 2015 at age 67.Incidentally, in a bit of bitter irony, the opening act for The Factory gig was a band called The Grim Reapers, a group that included future Cheap Trick guitarist and noted hat enthusiast Rick Nielsen.
Divers recovered Redding’s body the next day, still strapped into his seat. His death stunned not just Madison but the music community worldwide. Redding was a workmanlike artist who finally had the world watching him, only to have it all cut short. He hadn’t scored his first major hit yet.“The thing that people don’t realize about Otis is that he never had a big hit during his lifetime,” Werner says. “‘The Dock of the Bay’ was his first really big hit, and that was after he was gone.”
Recorded shortly before the crash, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and time cemented Redding’s legacy as one of the greatest singers in the history of pop music. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, and pieces of the Beechcraft 18 plane that plunged into Lake Monona are on display there.“He provided a vision of how you could take that African-American tradition and, without compromising it, speak to everybody,” says Werner. “I think many more black artists [today] are able to simply be themselves and use their tradition without cutting the difference.”
A plaque at Monona Terrace that honors Redding contains a lengthy inscription that includes this passage:
On the morning of the flight to Madison, Redding had been warned of bad weather and was advised to postpone his trip. His loyalty to his Madison fans forced him to proceed. It was the only engagement of his career that he ever missed.
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