The Buffalo motel where Otis Redding penned a masterpiece
America’s extensive network of hotels and motels has played an unsuspectingly essential role in the cultural history of the world, whether in providing a place for Keith Moon to exercise his destructive energy, giving Alfred Hitchcock the perfect setting for a pioneering horror flick, or, in the case of Otis Redding, supplying the inspiration for a soul masterpiece.
Going right back to his early days, Redding’s music career was always inseparably tied to Stax Records in Memphis. This, after all, was the label that truly ‘discovered’ the soul singer, plucking him from the obscurity of ad-hoc gigs and impossibly obscure single releases. It was with Stax that his career properly began, recording a litany of the indisputable classics he is now renowned for – and, in turn, Redding’s output helped to establish Stax as the go-to place for American soul excellence.
Due to this unending relationship with Jim Stewart’s label, though, the stories behind the vast majority of his tracks begin and end within Stax’s recording studio, housed in an old Capitol Theatre in Memphis. It was there, after all, that those songwriting masterpieces were fleshed out by a number of Redding’s collaborators and, of course, Stax’s legendary house band, Booker T and the MGs.
Nevertheless, as Redding’s career began to snowball towards the mid-point of the 1960s, the soul star found himself spending a lot of time on the road, spreading the gospel of his incredible output everywhere from Georgia to Glasgow. Inevitably, then, a core part of his discography was hammered out while on the move, giving it a unique kind of quality that tends to set those tracks apart from the exclusively Stax-manufactured efforts.
One such track was Redding’s landmark 1965 single ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)’, the origin of which was carved out in the rather depressing surroundings of a motel room in Buffalo, New York, while the performer was out on the road with Jerry Butler.
Formerly of The Impressions, Butler always knew how to construct a legendary soul single, and from the brief fragment he played for Redding in that motel room, the pair created the entirety of ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’. Imbued with the universal heartbreak that often rears its head within the soul of that era, the song is one of Redding’s best, and it doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to recognise the impact that Buffalo had upon the track.
Namely, the songwriter’s exhaustive touring schedule, in a different city every night, inevitably contributed to the heartbreak, alienation, and, ultimately, exhaustion inherent within the song’s spirit.
Admittedly, it was not until Butler and Redding’s fragment was retrieved from the motel and brought to the altar of Stax that the single began to take its final shape, spurred on by producer and guitar maestro Steve Cropper. Still, though, the origin story of the single owes a lot to that dingy motel in New York.
Recorded and released in the spring of 1965, the single immediately became one of Otis Redding’s defining tracks, peaking at number two on the R&B charts and an impressive 21 on the pop charts – making it one of the singer’s most commercially successful offerings. More impressively, though, the song has since become something of a soul standard, inseparable from the incredible legacy of one of the genre’s greatest voices.
