Inside Otis Redding's Final Masterpiece '(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay'

When the phone rang at the Stax/Volt studios in Memphis in late November of 1967, guitarist Steve Cropper was surprised to hear Otis Redding on the other end, calling from the airport. "Usually Otis would check into the Holiday Inn or whatever hotel he was staying at and then he'd call for me to come over and do some writing," Cropper recalls. But this time Redding was too excited to wait. "I've got a hit," he told Cropper, so he wanted to come straight to the studio to flesh his idea out into a