Don Covay and Wilson Pickett had both enjoyed some success in the era of dance-craze soul. Among their various hits were Covay’s 1962 release ‘The Popeye Waddle’ for Cameo Parkway, a novelty song that promoted a dance based on the exaggerated movements of the cartoon character Popeye. R&B music had always had a comic sensibility, which Stax took to new heights of vaudeville, exploiting the stage persona of Rufus Thomas. His recordings – ‘Walking The Dog’, ‘Can Your Monkey Do The Dog’ and ‘Do The Funky Chicken’ – were low-rent animal impersonation routines taken wholesale from the minstrel shows of Beale Street. Mining a similar vein, Covay subsequently wrote the song ‘Pony Time’ for his stablemate Chubby Checker, the Philadelphian abattoir worker tuned superstar, whose worldwide hit ‘The Twist’ (1960) became the high point of novelty dance records. Pickett also recorded a prolific seam of dance-craze songs –‘Land Of 1000 Dances’ (1966) – a frenetic homage that paid tribute to the Pony, the Mashed Potato and the Alligator. Frustratingly difficult to work with, Covay and Pickett also had radically different personalities. Covay was more suited to songwriting than performance; he was unconfident on stage and, even in front of the studio microphone, looked nervous and intimidated. When backing singers joined the fray his insecurities would grow; he would fret that behind him were more naturally gifted singers – and often there were. Covay’s anxieties dated back to childhood. His father was a Baptist preacher, who first encouraged him to sing as a member of the family’s travelling gospel group the Cherry-Keys, and who died when Don was only eight. Covay then lived an itinerant life throughout his early teens, moving first to Washington, DC, where he briefly sang with Marvin Gaye in a local doo-wop group called the Rainbows, and then north to join the Little Richard caravan. Covay tried his luck as a performer with half a dozen small independent R&B labels, being signed and then dumped in short order. Each new rejection or failure ate away at his soul before he found a modicum of success with the song ‘Mercy Mercy’ (1964) on the tiny Rosemart label. It was a song that brought him cult attention on the musical grapevine (the song featured Jimi Hendrix on guitar) when he was still a session musician in New York and became part of Hendrix’s repertoire. After the Jimi Hendrix Experience was formed in London the song was picked up and recorded by the Rolling Stones, and it became the blueprint for Mick Jagger’s vocal stylisation. At risk of being lost in the discount bins, Atlantic picked up the distribution rights of the Rosemart single and tried to give ‘Mercy Mercy’ greater national visibility in the USA, eventually taking it to number one in the R&B Top Fifty, by which time it had become an underground classic in Europe.
Now signed to Atlantic but riven with uncertainty, Covay was sent south to Stax, mainly to give him an identity and more substantial backing tracks. But from the outset his relationship with the Memphis studio musicians was at best tense. More tellingly, a gulf of misunderstanding opened up between him and Jim Stewart, who was unimpressed by the singer’s idiosyncrasies and thought he was strange, unpredictable and only playing at genius. Covay seemed to avoid the microphone, fearing its challenges, and only really settled when he was in the more creative act of writing, or in the reassuring company of Stax’s master-guitarist Steve Cropper, who told author Rob Bowman: ‘I loved Don to death. We get along great but I don’t think Jim and them understood Don. He thinks in different areas and he was kind of driving people bananas.’
At least in part, Covay’s truculence grew from insecurity, not from arrogance. He was not only an anxious performer; as a writer he was uncertain about lyrics. He would often interrupt sessions to write on small scraps of paper and pages torn from school notebooks, worrying away at lyrics on songs he was supposed to be recording to tape. He would then misplace his pencil, or forget the nuance of a line, and so his reputation for chronic indecision grew. Yet he had some success with his 1965 hit ‘See-Saw’ – a charmingly naïve song that tapped into childhood memories but was kept credible by the relentless southern beat and blaring Memphis horns which drove away any sentimentality.
In marked contrast to Covay, Wilson Pickett was never a prisoner to doubt. Arrogant, demanding and projecting an unbridled superiority complex, Pickett imagined himself as a gifted and flawless singer, better than those around him, and, tragically, those who tried to help him. Pickett had been born in Alabama, where he stayed with his violent mother, then as a child moved north to Detroit to live with his estranged father. He grew up in the Motor City when it was thronged with gifted African-American soul singers. Over 400 small independent labels sprouted up in a city on the cusp of being dominated by the Motown corporation. Still a teenager, Pickett joined a local group, the Falcons, which also featured vocalists Eddie Floyd and ‘Sir’ Mack Rice, who subsequently joined Pickett in Memphis. It was there that they gave shape to two of Atlantic-Stax’s greatest ever releases, ‘Knock On Wood’ by Eddie Floyd (1966) and Pickett’s irrepressible sex and soul song ‘Mustang Sally’ (1965).
In Detroit, Pickett replaced Joe Stubbs, the older brother of Levi Stubbs, as lead singer of the Falcons, but it was clear from the outset that he was not temperamentally suited to being in a group. Stubbs once said that Pickett could start a fight in an empty dressing room, and others who travelled with him spoke of his vaulting ambition. The Falcons were a vocal sensation locally and gave Pickett an early taste for celebrity, one he craved to the point of addiction later in life. In the Detroit of the late fifties, the Falcons had recorded an early hit, ‘Let Me Be Your Boy’, which was eventually issued on the local Correc-tone label; the song became famous as much for its backing vocals as Pickett’s own performance. The backing singers were Florence Ballard and the Primettes, another group of local hopefuls poised to become Detroit’s most famous group, the Supremes.
Pickett’s reputation as a vocalist came to the attention of Jerry Wexler in New York when he sent a demo tape of songs for consideration, and which Atlantic ostensibly set aside for Solomon King. Recognising his potential, Wexler sent Pickett to Memphis, unintentionally creating the impression that he kept his most stable singers in New York and offloaded his most unruly south to Memphis. Having tasted local success in Detroit, Pickett already had an overblown sense of his own importance, and, given the growing reputation of the city where he grew up, his reputation came tinged with a swaggering arrogance. Wexler fed his ego, once describing him as having ‘matinee idol looks, flaming eyes, lustrous ebony skin [and] a sleek muscular torso’. His voice was ‘a cyclone of conviction’ and he was ‘a black panther’ before the phrase was political. Many who worked with Pickett, including the very best session musicians at Stax, knew he had talent in abundance but felt that he was condescending about Memphis and could barely disguise his contempt for those around him. Paradoxically, it was Memphis and not Detroit that provided the streak of success that was to become the bedrock of Wilson Pickett’s career. In one unprecedented year in 1966, Pickett fronted a stream of songs that were only ever matched by Otis Redding, among them ‘634-5789’ (Soulsville U.S.A.), ‘Ninety-Nine And A Half (Won’t Do)’, ‘Land Of 1000 Dances’ and ‘Mustang Sally’. Pickett had much to thank Memphis for but rarely got round to doing it.
Pickett was driven by risk and was an unrestrained gambler, playing craps and dice between sets. His biographer, Tony Fletcher, claims: ‘In his dressing room at the Apollo it wasn’t uncommon for him and his entourage to engage in a $20,000 freeze-out, which meant that if you bet such a sum and lost it, you were done, no going back . . .’ At American Sound Studio, where Pickett’s lifetime associate the guitarist and vocalist Bobby Womack had joined the rhythm section, he recorded the self-aggrandising classic ‘Stagger Lee’, a song so saturated in the myths of reckless gambling and violent nightlife it could have been Pickett’s biography. By March 1968, Pickett returned to American Sound Studio, where the local session musicians were on a high, having taken local band the Box Tops to an unexpected number one with the song ‘The Letter’. By now Womack was a fixture, and he embarked on a reckless and drug-fuelled
friendship with Pickett based on overconfidence and limitless lines of cocaine. The talented and unpredictable pairing wrote numerous songs together, not least another story of unrestrained nightlife and garrulous sexuality, ‘I’m A Midnight Mover’.
When Pickett first arrived in Memphis, the relationship between Stax and Atlantic was a thriving two-way street, mutually beneficial to both parties. Atlantic provided a distribution system that had tentacles in communities Stax could never reach, including suburban homes in the north and west, and richer white neighbourhoods across the USA. But, in turn, Stax was a production nerve centre, offering a raw, robust and unique studio sound that regularly enriched Atlantic’s reservoir of talent. A contractual deal eventually emerged out of informal arrangements, giving Atlantic the sole rights to distribute Stax Records and providing a stream of studio work for Stax. Buried deep in the contract was a clause, of which Wexler has always claimed he was unaware, that in effect gave Atlantic or its owners rights in the master tapes. The Warner Bros.-Seven Arts takeover upset the informality that had once defined the relationship and suddenly Stax faced an unimagined threat: the lion’s share of their back catalogue was being swept away to New York and into the grasp of a soulless conglomerate.
As a teenager growing up in Detroit, Pickett had become perilously obsessed with guns and was less than discreet about carrying weapons. Covay described him as ‘young and wild’, but others were less kind. Several Stax musicians had witnessed close up his volcanic moods, which could be triggered by even the smallest setback, and had come to avoid him even within the corridors of the studio. Jim Stewart refused to have him back again and banned Pickett from the Stax studios. Rather than take Pickett back north, Atlantic bosses then traded him like a belligerent NBA star to another team; this time he was moved to American Sound Studio on Thomas Street in Memphis where he recorded with Bobby Womack and, finally, when tolerance ran out there, to Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a southern rival to Stax that had also come within Wexler’s radar as relationships with Stax soured. For a year in Memphis, Pickett’s friendship with Womack was a crazed round of drugs, guns and debauchery: soul out of control.
Throughout his life Pickett failed to control his temper and his obsession with hand guns never receded for long. In 1987 he faced prison for carrying a loaded shotgun in his car but he struck a deal and paid a heavy fine. He was then arrested for recklessly driving his car across the mayor of Englewood’s lawn, in an aggressive act of misplaced revenge for a civic misdemeanour that no one was ever able to ascertain. He was fined on several other occasions for drunken driving, drug offences and spousal abuse, and then, most tragically of all, he played a role in the death of an eighty-six-year-old pedestrian. Pickett was at the wheel of the car that ran down retired animator Pepe Ruiz in New Jersey. Ruiz had once been vice president of the Animators’ Union in New York City, and his funeral brought a grieving congregation of friends and colleagues. Yet, despite the catalogue of criminal offences, broken promises and misadventures that marred his life, the ‘Wicked’ Wilson Pickett was frequently lauded by the music fraternity, his great Memphis releases still somehow overshadowing his dark and threatening personality.
By February 1968, having been rebuffed by Atlantic’s new lawyers, Stax were waking up to the ice-cold realisation that their entire business was at risk and that the good old days were now firmly in the past. Atlantic was changing, and so, too, was the entire recording industry. The consolidated sales figures for 1967 landed on the desks of Atlantic’s new owners in the early weeks of February. There were three obvious factors. The first was that Atlantic was a successful business that, with the help of Stax, had taken eighteen different singles into the Billboard charts that summer. Second, despite the previously cordial relations, Atlantic viewed Stax as only one in a myriad of independent companies in a wealthy chain of distribution. It announced that another slate of southern-based soul labels were joining the family, including Henry Stone’s Dade Records in Miami, which included the much admired vocalist Benny Latimore, and South Camp from Alabama, which included vocalists Don Varner and Bill Brandon. Third, and perhaps most significant of all, it was clear that Atlantic and its new parent company Warner Bros.-Seven Arts had identified a new and growing market opportunity: album sales. In January 1968, at a sales convention in Nassau, Atlantic launched a new push into the LP market, in part buoyed by the rise of stereo sound and the sales spike in home entertainment furniture systems. That momentum was about to be boosted by two posthumous Otis Redding albums, The Dock Of The Bay and The Immortal Otis Redding. The direction of travel was clear: death sells, and the dominance of the teenage singles market was in retreat. Diversification into new adult markets was the next big thing.
Sam and Dave were unquestionably the greatest male duo to emerge out of the classic era of sixties soul but their energetic partnership was founded on an underlying tension: they hated the sight of each other. When Sam Moore and Dave Prater first met, they were rivals on the Miami amateur-night scene, trying to hack out a professional contract in one of soul music’s outlying cities. Reputedly, they had shared the same bill on gospel tours but first spoke to each other on stage in 1960 at a crime-riddled nightclub called the King of Hearts on 7th Avenue and then performed as a duo at Miami’s black-owned Sir John Hotel. Duos were traditionally based on imagined love affairs between two singers – one male and the other female – but Sam and Dave were never a love affair and threw a stick of dynamite through the door of expectation. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and their New York rivals Chuck Jackson and Maxine Brown, shared romantic and descanting lines, harmonising like lovesick gospel singers. Sam and Dave growled like rabid dogs, barking at each other across the stage and performing wild acrobatics. Their stage show was thunderous and their R&B voices tougher than leather. They became known as ‘Double Dynamite’, the ‘Dynamic Duo’ and briefly ‘The Sultans of Sweat’, but as their career boomed and then bust, that early testosterone was replaced with a bitter rivalry. Sam and Dave’s ambition took them from Miami’s late-night dives to the grandmaster of Florida soul music, Henry Stone, a legend of a man who set up over one hundred independent record labels in his life but became renowned as the owner of Miami’s TK Records. Stone’s real name was Henry Epstein and, like Jerry Wexler, with whom he built up a distribution agreement similar to the one with Stax, he had been born and raised in a middle-class Jewish home in the Bronx. When Sam and Dave came into Stone’s orbit, their explosive stage show was already the talk of the local music scene. Stone mentioned them to Wexler, and together the two of them visited the King of Hearts club. Within a matter of days Sam and Dave had signed to Atlantic and been farmed out to East McLemore. Yet another troubled act was on its way to Memphis.
Sam and Dave’s first two Stax singles stiffed, but a third, written and produced by Isaac Hayes and David Porter, was a hit. The rousing and gospel-tinged ‘You Don’t Know Like I Know’ (1966) was tailor-made for the urban R&B charts and for the influential Mod clubs of Europe in the mid sixties. But it was only a taste of what was to come. The next single – the relentless, sexual innuendoladen ‘Hold On I’m Coming’ (1966) – was, according to Stax myth, rush-recorded after a throwaway line shouted by lyricist David Porter when he was delayed in the studio toilets. The song effortlessly climbed to the summit of the R&B charts, masquerading as a song about the comforts of love rather than full-on sexuality. Helped by Atlantic’s distribution into mainstream stores, it then broke into the pop charts. It became a song that would carry the imprimatur of Stax around the world and has since been covered by a galaxy of stars including Aretha Franklin, Tom Jones, Solomon Burke, Bryan Ferry, Eric Clapton and B.B. King, Martha and the Vandellas, and Bruce Springsteen. Success failed to tame Sam and Dave. Photo shoots, travel plans and radio interviews became a battlefield, and what began as bickering and petty squabbles mushroomed into full-blown stand-offs. For months on end, as their success grew and the demands of being together intensified, the d
uo only really connected on stage. They ignored each other when they travelled from city to city and often insisted on different dressing rooms and separate tour cars. By February 1968 their most recent hit record, the epic ‘Soul Man’, which had been released towards the end of 1967, had reached the pinnacle of the charts and was spreading like wildfire across the globe. The concept for the song had come to Isaac Hayes, who had seen graffiti of the word ‘soul’ daubed on windows and walls during news coverage of the urban riots in Newark and Detroit in the summer of 1967. Hayes told a Washington Post journalist: ‘If you put “soul” on your door, looters and arsonists would bypass it, like with the blood of the lamb during the days of Passover. And so we extrapolated that as pride – I’m a soul brother, I’m a soul man.’
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