Dennis McCann: Searching by the dock of the bay

Originally published Dec. 10, 2008

Half of the time you could ask me what I was doing at this time yesterday and I’d have to think long and hard to answer. The old cranial database is getting increasingly leaky.

But ask me what I was doing 41 years ago today and watch with wonder as I come up with the answer. I was riding around Lake Monona in Madison that foggy evening in my friend Tom Hart’s car, helping searchers look for the remains of Otis Redding’s sunken plane.


Well, that’s too generous by half. We were riding around looking for the searchers, not that there was much of anything we could have done to help beyond general rubbernecking and head shaking, and there’s never a shortage of that kind of “help”. The real truth is we didn’t find the searchers anyway, so the recovery of the twin-engine plane that carried Redding, the hot young soul singer, and his band, the Bar-Kays, was eventually accomplished without our teenage contributions. But it left us with a we-were-there moment for the ages, even if we weren’t really.

Redding, his manager, pilot and four members of the Bar-Kays, all en route to Madison for two shows at The Factory, a downtown club, died in the crash. One band member survived the crash; another who had flown by commercial plane was not involved. The event has become another somber moment in Wisconsin music history, right up there with Stevie Ray Vaughn’s death in a1990 helicopter crash at Alpine Valley near East Troy.


What’s most amazing, looking back, is how young Redding was at the time of his death – just 26 - and how big a musical figure he became after it. His biggest-selling pop song, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” recorded just three days earlier, reached number one on both pop and R&B charts, and his label had a string of other posthumous hits. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.

Naturally, I don’t remember what I was doing the night he was inducted. But on the sad note of this anniversary let’s at least enjoy this You Tube video of Otis and “The Happy Song (Dum, Dum).”