Indoors there is a different dynamic, particularly if it’s a crowd confronted with something they’ve never seen before, which was certainly the case of the Los Angelinos that headed to the Whisky to see Otis Redding that April weekend in 1966. In the open air, excitement spreads like fire. & the M.G.’s-because he benefitted from the festival setting. It happened later at the Monterey International Pop Festival in ’67-backed then by Stax/Volt house band Booker T. Otis managed that crossover but not at the Whisky. So they set up shop right on the Sunset Strip, home to such hip rock‘n’rollers as the Byrds, Love, the Turtles and the Doors, figuring there was no better place to introduce Redding to a white audience. The idea wasn’t to have Otis record pop music, but rather bring his act straight to the rock audience. Redding’s residency was a deliberate attempt on the part of the singer and his management to move him out of the Chitlin Circuit and into the mainstream.
This is the residency that is captured in its entirety on Stax’s six-disc box Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings.
For his ’66 stint at the Whisky A Go Go, he was backed by his road band, the Otis Redding Revue-a ten-piece group similar to the bands who supported him whenever he toured the south. A few songs earlier, he first informed the crowd that they were recording the concert with plans of releasing it as an album, playing the newly-written “Good to Me” for the second time in nine songs simply because it was the single and they needed to get it right. Otis Redding says these words just before launching into “Respect” on April 8, 1966, wrapping up the first of seven sets he’d play over the course of three days at Los Angeles’ Whisky A Go Go.
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