Steve Cropper

And if you listen to songs that I collaborated with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him.

Well, he never really...

He might say the big O in a song or something like that, but Otis didn't really write about himself, but I did.

Songs like Mr. Pitiful, Sad Song, Fa Fa, they were all about Otis and Otis' life.

And Dock of the Bay is exactly that.

I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay.

It was all about him going out to San Francisco to perform.

And that's kind of the way I wrote with Otis.

I wrote The Bridge and stuff like that.

And that's the way we collaborated.

He trusted me.

You know, I always seemed to...

to do the things that he liked, worked on songs.

that came out the way he wanted them.

And I also worked on a lot of songs with Otis, arrangement-wise, and helped him put them together and all that, where I didn't claim any writers or anything, because it wasn't necessary.

Otis had most of it finished to begin with, and I just helped him do it.

But a lot of these things where he had just bits and pieces, I would actually put them together, and we'd make whole songs out of them and go in the next day and record them.

So we had a lot of fun together.

Otis was a great guy to work with, and he was a great friend.

Right, it was.