Docking Time

Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

Docking TimeAuthor(s): Irene YoonSource: Transition, No. 115, Mad (2014), pp. 116-129Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the Hutchins Center for African andAfrican American Research at Harvard UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/transition.115.116Accessed: 24-03-2017 03:53 UTC

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World Wide Underground

(Erykah Badu).

Watercolor on water reistant surface. 20 ×

16 in. Courtesy of Gravers Lane

Gallery, U.S.A. ©2013 Justin

Hopkins.


Yoon • Docking Time 117

Docking Time

Otis Redding sitting at the crosscurrents of history

Irene Yoon

On December 10, 1967, en route to a show in Madison, Otis Redding’s small Beechcraft—and with it Redding, his pilot, and five members of The Bar-Keys—crashed into Wisconsin’s Lake Monona. Only twenty-year-old trumpeter Ben Cauley survived. The performance was to be one of Redding’s first after over two months of recovery from throat surgery. According to friends and fellow musicians at Stax Records, he was singing better than ever and eager to get back to work—with good reason: in October, following his legendary performance at the Mon-terey Pop Festival, British music magazine Melody Maker had named Redding the world’s number one male vocalist, knocking Elvis Presley out of the spot he’d held for a decade. The White House had just con-tacted him with an invitation to entertain the troops in Vietnam early the next year. In biographer Scott Freeman’s words, “Otis was on the brink. He was poised for a breakthrough to the white audience, on the verge of superstardom.”

The song Redding finished recording just three days before his death would reach number one on both the Pop and R&B charts the following month and stay there for four consecutive weeks. It became by far his biggest hit—his first to make number one (much less break the Top 20) on the mostly white U.S. Pop charts—and poignant in-dication of the success he would not live to see. That song was, of course, “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay.” Its popularity has since become so intertwined with his death and the social upheaval of 1968, so freighted with retrospective nostalgia, that no one has really examined it on its own terms, in its own time—or Redding’s. Yet the sense of melancholic delay and unrealized potential that haunt the song’s posthumous release are as much elements of the tensile, jagged-edged present it stages as they are its historical legacy. The song itself compels us to think about time, history, and resistance differently, to consider how multiple narratives might come together to make a moment, rather than the other way around. It asks us, in short, to sit.

Otis was on the brink. He was poised for a breakthrough to the white audience, on the verge of superstardom.


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Whether reckoning with the despair of the struggling everyman or the visions of the flower child, Redding’s song drops anchor in its present moment, briefly docking time from the immutability of a bleak future or the possibility of hope to come.

Delivery into 1968

Five months after Redding’s death, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the same motel where Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper had stayed up countless nights to write many of the songs that had made Redding’s career. In the year that followed, unrest, violence, and demands for change only multiplied on both the national and the global stages. By the end of January, the Tet Offensive was underway in Vietnam. Students all over the world were rising in vehement antiwar protest, race riots erupted in 110 cities across the country, and by June, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down, too. Meanwhile, in Memphis, as the civil rights move-ment shifted dramatically, so too did soul music, defined in part by Jim Stewart’s Stax Records.

Following Redding’s death, Stax lost not only its biggest star, but also rights to its entire back catalogue through an oversight of fine print when Atlantic Records, Stax’s national distributor, was sold to Warner Brothers. All of Stax’s original master recordings in the 1960s—includ-ing those of Redding, Sam and Dave, Booker T. & the MG’s, and Albert King—now belonged to the national conglomerate. The dissolution of Stax would only deepen as it sought to compete independently with the changing market for soul music in years to come. Against the po-tential social harmony that many saw the increasing popularity of soul music as offering in this tumultuous time, musicologist Christopher Small identifies a more insidious force at work in its crossover success (which he dates to the early 1970s): a greater emphasis on individual monetary success.

But the crossover success of soul music arguably began a few years earlier, with the release of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” on Janu-ary 8, 1968. The song encompasses both sides of soul music’s potential for providing some kind of social unity and the divisive allure of going commercial and mainstream. By the end of 1967, Redding was report-edly anxious to leave his wife Zelma, his manager Phil Walden, and what he saw as the economic and artistic constraints of Stax; he had begun secret negotiations with Atlantic for an unprecedentedly hefty signing bonus for a black musician and increased control over his songwriting and production. This last song was the one, as Freeman puts it, that the commercially savvy Redding “knew was the record that was going to open a door long nailed shut; he just never got to step inside.”



The song sat at the historical threshold of Redding’s tragic death, his remarkable crossover success, the death of King and the changing civil rights movement, and the commercialization and dissolution of “Soulsville, USA.” How could the song’s proximity to such dramatic change not generate readings filtered through the lens of what would follow it? Both Stewart and Redding’s wife Zelma have described the song as a kind of “premonition.” Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wex-ler attributed the song’s success to fans “taken with the mystical coin-cidence of the song and Otis’ death.” To others, his song remains an emblem of unrealized potential. Booker T. and the M.G.’s bassist Duck Dunn still muses, “It was almost like it was incomplete . . . If he’d’ve lived, we might have done something there. He’d have maybe taken it somewhere else.” For music historians like Craig Werner, the song and Redding’s early death at age twenty-six indicate an inclusive desire “to expand the conversation” that ended tragically just as it began.

Today, it remains nearly impossible, as cultural critic Tavia Nyong’o puts it, to rend his song from the “veritable shroud of mourning” its lyrics compose and Redding’s “piercing voice tears through.” Nor is it necessarily desirable to do so—at least not completely. Still, it’s striking that, apart from Nyong’o, just about every critic to touch on the song considers its composition and recording solely in terms of its proximity to Redding’s death, with little or no further analysis. One biographer, Jane Schiesel, even concludes her book with the song’s second verse and chorus (incorrectly) transcribed as a eulogy of sorts. Nyong’o upsets this trend, offering instead a compelling reading of the song as “the fiercest indictment of the racism that ghettoized black music and choked black freedom dreams” by considering what “an intensely personal, ostensibly apolitical song like ‘Dock of the Bay’ sum[s] up, divide[s], and deliver[s] into 1968.” This reading considers the song in light of a different telos, that of its release in the upheaval of that year. But this too comes at the cost of subordinating the various energies that converged in the making of the song to its afterlife in the “agon of ‘1968.’ ”

Continually allowing the “inside” that Redding “never got to step into” to eclipse the compositional energies and exchanges that con-verged to make the song, we lose sight of the song’s actual place in Redding’s life and artistic career. After all, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” is about what it means to inhabit one’s present, to arrive—finally—at the threshold of the Pacific, not to cross over it but to sit. What hap-pens if we move the conversation away from a transformative after to a consideration of the song itself as a nexus of temporal crosscurrents, musical traditions, and racial histories in the moment of its making? If writing and recording this last song was a matter of opening a door long nailed shut, let’s pause and consider with Redding just what that door looked like from the outside.


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Quest, the Historian

Himself (Quest-

love/Ahmir Thompson). Watercolor on water resistant

surface, 20 × 16 in. Courtesy

of Gravers Lane Gallery, U.S.A. ©2013 Justin

Hopkins.

The Dock of the Bay

The song’s ability to resonate with so many facets of its present mo-ment has everything to do with the story—or rather, stories—of its composition and location at the dock of the bay. While Redding’s voice brings together the compelling energies of the weary traveler



who’s only roamed so far “just to make this dock [his] home” and the disaffected observer already “sittin’ on the dock of the bay / wasting time,” the tension between the two lyrics is revealing. Redding began writing the song on a houseboat in Sausalito, where he was staying while playing at the Fillmore in San Francisco. He finished the song back at Stax with Steve Cropper. That much is certain. But the nature of this collaboration varies with each telling.

According to Schiesel, Redding drew his inspiration from his dis-dain for the itinerant, predominantly white, “flower children” who hung out on the Sausalito waterfront, telling his manager, “Man, look at them, they’re throwing their lives away, just hanging around wasting time.” Redding nevertheless wrote the rest of the song out of a desire to reach those very kids hanging around by his houseboat or at the Monterey Pop Festival; he aimed to expand his audience by integrating his sound with content that would speak to their experience. Cropper’s role would mainly be to collaborate on “the final touches.”

Freeman and Cropper’s more recent accounts contradict this origin story; in particular, they fixate on the two most biographical lines of the song. According to Freeman, Redding came into the studio with only the first line or two of the song—“Sittin’ in the morning sun / Sittin’ till the evening come”—and some chords, while the two worked together to write the rest. Redding paused after the first two lines, shaking his head and saying, “But I don’t know why he’s sitting,” before inserting the more biographically resonant lines, “I left my home in Georgia / Headed for the Frisco Bay.” Cropper, however, claims the autobiograph-ical lines and accidental conflation of the Sausalito waterfront with the San Francisco docks were a result of his input. During a September 2000 National Public Radio interview, he remembers,

Otis was one of those guys that had so many ideas, so much energy in him, so much music in him, he kinda had these traffic jams . . . And he needed help getting them worked out. Well, he came in, and he just sang the first line that he had . . . and said, “What are we gonna do with this?” The way I wrote with Otis—pretty simple formula actually. Otis was just bigger than life. It was real easy to write about Otis . . . . He had just left San Francis-co where he played at the Fillmore . . . I thought he was talking about watching the big ships come in, y’know by the San Francisco bridge, the Golden Gate bridge, and what he was actually referring to were the ferries that ran back and forth to Sausalito there. So the rest of the song where I said, “I left my home in Georgia / Headed


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for the Frisco Bay” was just about him going out there to perform at the Fillmore.

The way the song itself already captures the sense of excess these different sources evoke is much more intriguing than resolving the conflict between the variants. Later in the interview, Cropper reaches a telling impasse. After NPR’s Liane Hansen inquires about the unique appeal of this song, Cropper replies that it “just lyrically . . . hits the masses. It hit the workingman, it hit everybody . . . it’s, you know, my whole life is about bad luck and that sort of thing, and I’m just gonna take life as it comes. I think that’s why it hit so many people.” When Hansen then asks if the song were true to Redding at the time, he con-fidently answers yes but proceeds to narrate how everything was lining up for incredible success and happiness in Redding’s life. Realizing this internal contradiction as if for the first time, Cropper chuckles puzzlingly and muses, “I don’t know how to explain it either.” The song

is both about Redding’s life and patently not: this is perhaps equally true whether Cropper inserted the biographical lines for Redding or whether Redding came up with them in response to his own third-person protest, “But I don’t know why he’s sitting.”

The transposition of the popular hang-out for kids “just hanging around wasting time” with the more widely recognizable commercial docks of the San Francisco Bay

expands the song’s reach regardless. Oddly, it does so by evoking more concretely a history of hard-fought labor inclusion, not just willful dis-affection and itinerancy. The San Francisco Bay is the flagship home of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Before the Big Strike of West Coast dock laborers in 1934, black workers were mainly relegated to positions as temporary strikebreakers. At that point, there were only twenty-three unionized black dock laborers in the San Francisco Bay, and Harry Bridges, future president of the ILWU, went to black churches all over the area, rallying support for the strike by promising inclusion. Three years later, when the ILWU formed, the San Francisco Local 10 was widely regarded as a “haven of racial equal-ity,” with black community leaders publicly proclaiming Bridges “a godsend.” Local 10’s insistence on racial integration coupled with the substantial wartime immigration of thousands of black laborers—many, like Redding, roaming two thousand miles from home—brought black union membership up to roughly forty-five percent by the mid-1960s. Despite significant internal contradictions, the ILWU was decades

Redding drew his inspiration from his

disdain for the itinerant, predominantly white,

“flower children” who hung out on the Sausalito waterfront.



ahead of the rest of the country in promoting principles of labor equity and racial integration with its policies, and this—famously—took place on the dock of the “Frisco Bay.”

While the song might evoke this history, its singer does not partic-ipate in it; he sits, rests, wastes time. In this singer’s willful proximity to a site of labor inflected by a unique history of racial integration, however, we can recognize, along with Nyong’o, “the refusal of affective engagement the song models, an orientation towards work and com-mitment that goes beyond apathy to a rousing, radical passivity.” But the myth of the song’s creation also simultaneously evokes an alternative, “radical passivity” in the white counterculture and a site of black labor commitment that—at least on the surface—was itself an “indictment of the racism that ghettoized black music and choked black freedom dreams.” The double dislocation of the sitting singer on the dock of the bay suggests more forces at work in this adamant passivity.

Such comings and goings from different directions are what, in a sense, define the location of a dock in the first place. Thematizing this in his editing, Cropper mixed crashing waves and cawing gulls in the final track—the first and only time a Redding song would incorporate sound effects in its production in the manner of The Beatles and other pop rock bands of the 1960s. The meditative crosscurrents of the song find a literal analog in the sound effects of the flowing tide. Redding reaches the ostensible end of the road after roaming two thousand miles, but it seems to open up even greater possibility with the sea ahead; perhaps the singer has “been washed up before he began”—or he’s just arrived and not yet begun. The song finally situates itself in neither Sausalito nor San Francisco, in neither the black dock laborer nor the white flower child, neither Redding nor not Redding, but in the contemplation that hauntingly captures the fluctuations in be-tween, through seated stillness itself. Listening carefully to the song, we can hear what makes it so powerful—and perhaps so difficult to wrest from the events that would characterize its afterlife: its uncanny ability to dock the constant physical and temporal flux of crossing over and back again.

The Song

Like its unusual sound effects, the song’s chord structure mimics the rise and fall of waves. Each fluctuation finds its correspondence in the lyrics as the “morning sun” gives way to “evening come” and “the ships roll in” and “roll away again.” In the second verse, the chords rise and fall first with the singer’s departure from Georgia and arrival at the Fris-co Bay, and then with the negative assertions: nothing to aspire towards and nothing coming his way. Again, in the third verse, sitting to rest


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one’s bones collapses into tormenting loneliness that won’t leave him alone, just as the “two thousand miles [he] roamed” come back to the disappointed revelation of having done so “just to make this dock [his] home.” The experience of watching and listening to the tide coming in and out structures the very direction and rhythm of his thoughts.

While the verses repeatedly follow the natural rhythms of nature, what begins as a seemingly effortless give and take—watching the sun rise and set, for example—takes on a subtly corrosive effect. The chord movement of the verses repeats, evoking a lulling, zero-sum transaction of waves coming and going, but the verses’ lyrics suggest a gradual transformation and the increasing despondency of the stationary fig-ure. Each verse’s meditation grows more inwardly focused: from the outward observation of ships rolling in and out to the contemplation of his future fate and past disappointment, the verses pull the singer deeper into melancholy.

But if introspective sadness is where the lyrics are taking him, it’s also true that he never fully arrives there. The chorus’s chord progres-sion, almost identical to the verse’s, provides some melodic relief in changing, however slightly, the repetition of the verse’s rise and fall,

The Electricity

(Janelle Monae).

Watercolor on water resistant

surface, 14 × 18 in. Courtesy


Hopkins.



finally dropping down to rest on an E chord as Redding’s voice ach-ingly stretches the last word “time.” The striking effect of this chord highlights the unusual insistence of the song on translating—not unlike James Weldon Johnson’s “Ex-Colored Man” playing Chopin—what should be minor chords into major ones (one would expect an E mi-nor rather than an E major in the key of G). At odds with its governing signature, the song keeps color of the chords surprisingly bright and positive for a song ostensibly and increasingly about weariness and melancholy. Just as the insistence upon major chords marks a more cheerful fluidity in and out of the key of G, the melodic lines of both the voice and instruments (most clearly in the bass) invoke a bluesy melancholy in their chromatic movements over each chord. The col-lective effect is the palpable convergence of musical crosscurrents, the simultaneous echo of pop and blues sounds.

The rhythmic and tonal oscillation of the verse and chorus crest in the bridge at the moment where the singer declares, “Looks like nothing’s gonna change / Everything still remains the same / I can’t do what ten people tell me to do / So I guess I’ll remain the same.” The lyrical deflation at this moment of musical apotheosis confronts the tensions that lead up to it head on. But is the singer actually un-changed as he returns to the familiarity of the next verse? Redding’s voice pushes his intention to remain the same against the rising and changing progression of the music in order to reject what Nyong’o terms “a predictable future,” to wait for change with “self-punishing insistence,” but a sense of having already been affected by the very act of sitting nonetheless remains.

We can hear this at work, for example, in the melancholy cry that enters Redding’s voice at the beginning of the second verse when he sings the word “home.” As he repeats the word in reference to the dock at the end of the third verse, his voice quietly echoes the wavering emotion that attends such identification, bringing memory to bear on his present situation. The second verse and mention of his home in Georgia also cue the introduction of the horns. An R&B singer whose voice interacted with his horn section much as others’ would with back-up singers, Redding’s horns double the overt nod to his biographical and musical home in Macon. In the verse that inaugurates the song’s melancholy (nothing to live for and nothing coming my way), the horns haunt each melodic line, following Redding’s voice up and down notes from a harmonic distance. When the lyrics return to a reminder of his present, the horns suddenly drop out, only to sneak back in quietly at the end of the chorus, joining in fully at the bridge. As a result, the creeping past of his roots, as embodied in the horns, becomes part of what Redding resists in his declaration, “I can’t do what ten people tell me to do / So I guess I’ll remain the same.” The bridge resolves into


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the third and final verse, which relocates him in his present “home” at the dock of the bay, and the horns disappear once more. Instead of a desire to remain the same singer and man from Georgia, an identity moored in his past, the bridge seems to demonstrate a desire to cling to his position in the present, to the ahistorical ambivalence of a sitting observer.

What does it look like to “remain the same” in a place and moment defined by change? Or, as Redding would insist in response to his friends and family who feared that this song meant that he was chang-ing, for an individual to “still [be] the same me”? Even as the bridge emphasizes his resistance to change and rejection of a predictable future, the lyrics are still punctuated by his own uncertainty: things “look like” they might not change and he “guess[es]” he’ll remain the same. As he sits in radical passivity against the forces of future change and simultaneously attempts to wrest himself from his past, the distance he’s already covered—both physically and reflectively—serves both to bolster and trouble that stance.

As the third verse repeats the earlier narrative of leaving home for the Bay from the perspective of having already arrived, the lyrics—more so than the music this time around—bring the past into the present. His reflection on traveling so far just to make a dock his home sounds

at first to be an admission of failure, yet the absence of the haunting horns marks an underlying clarity in viewing, however ambivalently, his accomplishments in the present. As the verse flows into the chorus once more, however, the song draws the

horns back in for the last two lines—stronger now, as if the tidal pull of the chorus can’t help but bring in more of the second verse’s past—but this time, instead of dropping out as Redding sings “time,” or haunting his meditation from a distance, the horns blare emphatically on the E chord with him. The horns’ and voice’s collective note here sparks a surprisingly chipper and upbeat whistled melody as the song concludes.

The singer might distance himself from his past and future by fo-cusing entirely on his detachment from the scene before him, but in the course of his resistance, both literally and metaphorically occupy-ing a site of such fluid convergence, he’s forced to recognize his own complicity in change, even as—or perhaps, especially as—he desires to “remain the same.” The shift might be as subtle as adding one’s own breath to the rolling tide, as Redding does through his whistled outro, but it’s nevertheless necessary to allow for the possibility—however remote—of an alternative trajectory. By attempting to shore up the present in all its fullness, as Redding does in the song’s conclusion, the past and future take on new significance.

What does it look like to “remain the same”

in a place and moment defined by change?



“(Sittin’ On)”

A few notes on the history of the song and its musical afterlife will help us re-place the song within the historical narratives that other critics have fleshed out. Otis Redding never heard the song in its final form. Attempting to work through his grief, Steve Cropper went directly to the studio to mix the final track, finding sound effects at a local shop to fill in what he believed Redding would have wanted in the song (in a comical first run, Redding imitated the gulls himself). Cropper’s guitar fills, which sparkle so beautifully un-der Redding’s voice, also came in after his death. The uncanny, almost duet-like effect that undercuts some of the song’s melan-choly, and The Beatles-inspired sound ef-fects that contribute to the locational quality of the song, were both a product of their collaboration and, to a certain extent, inspired by Redding’s untimely death. The even mixing of instrumental and vocal tracks that was part of Stax’s signature style was originally rejected by Jerry Wexler at Atlantic. Wexler wanted to pull Redding’s voice out more and mute the effect of the band. Cropper attempted to remix it, but ultimately, feeling too emotionally attached to the song in the wake of Redding’s death, he just sent it back the same. In a nice echo of the kind of change sameness-over-time can bring about, Atlantic didn’t seem to notice or mind. The label declared the “second” version genius and released the record immediately to immense success.

The song, beyond its unprecedented popularity, was unlike anything else that Redding had done before. The meditative “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is a far cry from the songs that made Redding famous as the quintessential “Mr. Pitiful.” Instead of the physical energy that would have Redding stamping and shaking as he moaned his famous ad lib outros, pleading love, this song is adamantly about sitting still, watching the world move. For once, this wasn’t about a man and his love, it was about every man. Or, as Nyong’o puts it, “written from an intensely personal, even singular standpoint,” the song still “managed to articulate a universal discontent.” Its popularity on the pop and R&B charts underscores this common resonance, and returns us to our earlier question: how is it that “an intensely personal, even singu-lar standpoint” translates into a “universal” sentiment—or, at the very least, one capable of speaking to both sides of the essentially segregated music charts?

As a provisional answer, while the pleading and raw honesty of the lovelorn Redding might be ubiquitous sentiments, they were also ones firmly ensconced in a long tradition of black blues and R&B. Of course, the meditative “sitting song” likewise has a long history in black musical

For once, this wasn’t about a man and his love, it was about every man.


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Piano in the Dark

(Andre 3000). Watercolor on water resistant

surface. 20 × 16 in. Courtesy


Hopkins.

traditions. From R. L. Burnside’s “Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down,” recorded the same year as “Dock of the Bay,” to Louis Armstrong and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair” (1929), further back to spirituals like “Tell It” and “We’ve Come a Long Way,” the common thread is weary waiting for relief to come. These songs anticipate the oppor-tunity to sit in peace as a destination. The cranky father of “Rockin’ Chair” feels “chained to [his] chair,” yet even he constantly implores his Aunt Helena in heaven, undoubtedly at more peace than he, to



send down “a sweet chariot” to take him to her so they can sit togeth-er. Redding’s voice and lyrics draw on this tradition, but his song also significantly complicates the anticipatory structure of the black sitting song by locating the rest—and the weariness—one finds in the here and now. Redding sits, not in heaven—or even, in Wexler’s terms, on some “big dock-of-the-bay in the sky”—but rather on the dock of the San Francisco Bay in 1967, over two thousand miles from his home in Macon, Georgia.

We see a second tradition of sitting songs come to the fore as a re-sult. Songs like The Kinks’s “Waterloo Sunset” (1965) and The Beatles’s “I’m Only Sleeping” (1966) give voice to a similarly willful passivity, “keeping an eye on the world going by my window / taking my time.” In the years to follow, the disaffection of the white counter-culture’s sitting songs would concretize as a subgenre, with other hits like Cat Stevens’s “Sitting” (1972), The Kinks’s “Sitting in the Midday Sun” (1973), and Lennon’s posthumous release “Watching the Wheels” (1981). Red-ding’s song engages this emerging tradition, but there remains a stark distance between it and the voluntary itinerancy of the white youth lying in bed. “Sitting in the Midday Sun,” for example, romanticizes the life of a tramp “sitting by the side of a river” with “no need to worry . . . no hurry . . . / looking at the world go by.” It’s difficult to imagine Redding proclaiming things like “who needs a job when it’s sunny,” or “when I see the people shouting at each other / I’d rather be an out-of-work bum.” Instead, his song retains both the melancholy of the downtrodden and the willful sitting and utopian reflection captured by these songs. The conflation of Sausalito and San Francisco might have been accidental, but it demonstrates the simultaneous convergence and contention that renders the song so difficult to pin down and so personally—and universally—powerful as the nexus of a long tradi-tion of weary black anticipation and an emergent tradition of white disaffection and contemplation.

Redding’s song is inevitably yoked to the poignancy of its proximity to his death and the events that followed. But we ought not overlook how it also captures the tensions inhering in its present moment. In it, the privileged hippie, the washed-up wanderer, the successful musician, and anyone in-between could find some resonance because the song is never just about one experience or the other, but about the crosscur-rents that characterize their momentary convergence at the threshold of an unopened door. There is perhaps little to inspire optimism, given the historical changes that would come on the other side—there is, instead, melancholy, resistance, and weariness. But in recognizing the immutability of the future and disappointment of the past, Redding’s song becomes itself a meditative anchor in the ongoing pull of time, presenting sameness as an index of change itself.


Docking Time

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