by Jochen Markhorst
XIV To make this Key West dock my home
The fishtail ponds and the orchid trees They can give you the bleedin’ heart disease People tell me - I oughta try a little tenderness Amelia Street - Bay View Park Walkin’ in the shadows after dark Down under - way down in Key West
The highlight of EPiC, the documentary Elvis Presley in Concert (Baz Luhrmann, 2025), the stunning film about Elvis’ Las Vegas years, is undoubtedly the “Polk Salad Annie” segment, masterfully pieced together from three different performances. Thanks also to the magical mystery wizard Peter Jackson, who in 2021 demonstrated with his Beatles documentary Get Back what patience, vision and technical mastery can mean for audio. A second, equally magnetic highlight is the clip in which Elvis sits down on a stool at the front of the stage and starts playing “Little Sister” on his guitar. In itself a fine, Elvis-worthy Doc Pomus song, of course, but the magic only really begins to sparkle when The King seamlessly integrates “Get Back” into the song.
Elvis Presley – Little Sister Get Back (Rehearsal 1970):
A stylistic trick similar to the move with which Otis Redding elevated “Try A Little Tenderness” to nobility a few years before Elvis’ Las Vegas gig. Until 1966, until Otis, “Try A Little Tenderness” was just a “regular” little masterpiece in the American Songbook. First recorded in 1932 by Ray Noble and his Orchestra, it was a minor hit for Ruth Etting in 1933. Bing Crosby recorded it, Sinatra recorded it for the first time in 1946, and when Ol’ Blue Eyes recorded it again in 1960, this time in a sublime arrangement by the legendary Nelson Riddle, the song became an indisputable American Songbook standard.
And the song reaches a next level when Otis shines his light. In the autumn of 1966, he is in the studio with Booker T. & The MG’s and producer Isaac Hayes. Hayes and Otis throw themselves onto an arrangement for “Try A Little Tenderness”.
The opening is slow and soulful, still somewhat close to the Sinatra standard: sultry and elegant. The change in the second verse then completely transforms the song and sets a new standard. Drummer Al Jackson awakens, doubles the tempo with rimshots, short, vicious taps, striking the rim of the snare drum, and continues to impose a compelling pulse like a metronome. “Exciting” is too weak a description. The entire band – piano, organ, guitar, bass, horns – seems to struggle out of a straitjacket for two verses, filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, as Salieri sighs in Shaffer’s Amadeus.
The apotheosis, from 2’35”, when Jackson gives the signal by starting to “really” drum is perfect. Otis growls and snarls, throws in Duke Ellington’s “Just Squeeze Me (But Please Don’t Tease Me)” over an agonisingly slow climb to the climax. A find that Hayes and Redding apparently recognise as the perfect finale – so have it played twice more.
Otis himself also realises that he has created something special. The song remains on his set list for the rest of his far too short career, and is his swan song: it is the last song Otis plays at his final performance, on 9 December 1967 in Cleveland – the day before the fatal plane crash.
Otis Redding – Try A Little Tenderness 9 December 1967:
The nod to “Try A Little Tenderness” in this eighth verse of “Key West” fuels the idea that Otis was one – or perhaps even the – trigger for the song’s creation. After all, one step higher than “Try A Little Tenderness” is:
Sittin' here restin' my bones This loneliness won't leave me alone Two thousand miles I roamed To make this Key West dock my home Now I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay Watchin' the tide roll away Sittin' on the dock of the bay Wastin' time
In 1981, David Allan Coe relocates the scene to Key West in his version of Otis’ greatest song and pièce de résistance, Otis’ last song “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” (1967). On the same record from which DJ Dylan picked “Tennessee Whiskey” for his radio show, and Dylan may also have recognised his old 1960s comrades Pete Drake on steel guitar and Hargus “Pig” Robbins on keyboards. Coe leaves the song as unfinished as Otis did at the time. Well, “unfinished” according to co-author, guitarist and producer Steve Cropper, anyway, who, of course, has some authority on the matter:
“On the record, he started whistling because he didn’t really have anything to fade out with. If you listen to almost 99 per cent of all of Otis’ other songs, he’s got a fadeout that he goes into, a chant or a rap or something that’s totally different from the rest of the song. But on that particular one, he couldn’t think of anything — and he started whistling. He really didn’t get it right until about the third take, and that was it.”
(Morton Through Midnight, BBC Radio Scotland, 22 November 2014)
After the concert in Madison, Otis and the Bar-Keys were supposed to return to Memphis to finish the recording, presumably with lyrics for that last verse, Cropper thinks. But Otis would never return, and producer Cropper decided, through his tears, to mix the final recordings, including Otis’s whistling. Though engineer Ron Capone did have an opinion thereon, an amused Cropper recalls:
“There’s some outtakes, and Ron Capone gets on the talk-back mic, on the original session, and said something about: ‘Otis, one thing for sure; you’ll never be a whistler.’ [Laughs] I guess Otis showed him!”
Dylan attempted “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” once, on 3 March 1970, during the fourth Self Portrait session in New York, but that recording was never released. More well-known is the story that Dylan offered “Just Like A Woman” to Otis on 8 April 1966 in the dressing room of the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, a fact reported by Robbie Robertson, Otis’ manager Phil Walden, photographer Lisa Law and Dylan himself. Dylan’s account is somewhat less colourful than those of Robertson and Walden (“Well, I didn’t necessarily think it was a good song for him to do, but he asked me if I had any material. It just so happened that I had the dubs from my new album,” Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner, 1969). Otis seems delighted, but a recording never appears. Years later, Robertson happens to run into Otis’ manager Phil Walden and asks him why the cover never appeared. Otis did indeed attempt the song, Walden says, but couldn’t get the bridge over his lips:
“Otis went into the studio to record that song and couldn’t get through it. When he got to the bridge and the part about “amphetamine and pearls,” he couldn’t get those words to come out of his mouth. It just didn’t fit, and he had to scrap the idea.”
(Robbie Robertson, Testimony, 2016)
Amphetamines and pearls do indeed carry more weight than dallying on a sunny pier or the soft words spoken so gently in “Try A Little Tenderness”. On the other hand: ‘La chanson est si peu souvent l’œuvre, c’est-à-dire la pensée chantée et comprise du chanteur – The song is so rarely the work, that is to say, the singer’s sung and understood thought,’ according to Rimbaud (the line before the famous Je est un autre in his “Lettre du Voyant”, 1871). Amply demonstrated by Harry Woods, the writer of “Try A Little Tenderness”. Harry was born without fingers on his left hand and was known for his drinking and violent temper. A fight in a bar escalated so badly that the police were called. Woods held his opponent by the throat with his good hand and beat the man’s face to a pulp with his stump. A woman present in the bar was shocked. “Who is that terrible man?” she asked. One of Woods’ drinking buddies replied, “That’s Harry Woods. He wrote “Try a Little Tenderness”.” (Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song – David A. Jasen, 2004).
To be continued. Next up Key West part 15: Amelia
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s looking for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
- It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs