His halting performance at the Oscars was in marked contrast to his return home to Memphis, where a spontaneous groundswell of excitement grew and thousands who had seen him live on television mobbed the airport. Hayes and his grandmother were escorted through the crowds by police officers who parted a pathway through a congested concourse. He held the Oscar aloft in one hand like a sporting trophy and protected his grandmother with his other arm as she smiled at the crowds, tiny and bespectacled and with her gospel coiffure still immaculate from the night before. There can be no more sentimental image in the entire history of soul music than Hayes oozing machismo in dark glasses and a sawn-off denim jacket, Memphis Invaders-style, shielding his grandmother in a gesture of unconditional love. Mrs Rushia Wade finally shed a tear of joy when her grandson was met by local dignitaries at the airport and given the special award of Honorary Colonel and Aide-De-Camp of the Governor of Tennessee. The archaic award – steeped in the history of the civil war – was in marked contrast to the frantic urban street music of Shaft, but Isaac Hayes dutifully accepted and then told them he planned to take the next day off and just ‘walk the streets of the black community, and thank the people personally’. One of the deepest discriminations in the history of Memphis had been broken. The city’s highest honours, until then always gifted to whites, were bestowed on a bald ghetto superstar with a strident sense of his own emancipation, who went by the name of ‘Black Moses’.
On the blackboard in Al Bell’s office in Stax is a list of tasks, and to the upper right his vision of a new era for the label written in chalk – ‘A Soul Explosion, By People, For People, ’Cause People Buy Stax-Volt Records’.
© Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
AL BELL’S
BIG THERMOMETER
May
Al Bell’s thermometer was a thing of crude beauty. It was grafted onto the office wall with all the cut-out elegance of a daycare centre, and Bell measured it day and night. What excited him most was when the temperature rose to the point where it broke through the measuring gauge and threatened to explode. Then he could announce to the assembled staff in the voice of an eccentric doctor that Stax was gripped by fever. He even named this new wave of activity as the ‘Soul Explosion’. The office thermometer was something more than a corporate sales chart, it was a visible symbol of Stax’s performance on the marketplace: the new releases, the records they had out there that were still selling, and the new directions in what had become a fast-changing and unpredictable market. ‘I took a poster board and drew a thermometer, and filled it at the bottom with red ink. As sales increased, I would increase the mercury,’ he told writer Robert Gordon. ‘And at the top of the thermometer, I had it explode out into what I called Heaven. And that was after we had achieved our goal.’
The thermometer had arrived at a critical moment in the evolution of soul music. The genre was expanding in a hundred different directions. The bubblegum soul that Motown had perfected from their factory in Detroit was far from exhausted and groups like the Supremes and the Temptations still dominated the charts. But new impassioned forms of soul music enriched by social commentary were finding their voice, and for the first time in their narrow-minded history, the movies were beginning to show a passing interest in a black audience. Nonetheless, the distant past still exerted a powerful influence on sales: gospel was thriving and there was still a market for big voices. Although Bell was not convinced that Stax had found a serious replacement for Otis Redding, Johnnie Taylor was emerging as a serious contender, and Aretha Franklin was at the height of her powers, albeit out of Stax’s reach – signed to the detested Atlantic Records.
Bell’s biggest challenge was not just to second guess the capriciousness of musical tastes but to rebuild Stax after their devastating fallout with Atlantic. Nor was it simply about building a new roster of artists; he had to become the architect of a new distribution network that could reach deep into the ghetto record stores and look beyond their core market in the southern towns, breaking consistently into the cosmopolitan markets in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. As Bell went about the daunting task of rebuilding a Stax empire that had been denied some of its biggest names, he was tasked with another urgent shift of focus: to navigate away from recording one-off catchy singles and break into the more lucrative albums market. Change was everywhere, social, economic and creative.
Bell was in many respects the perfect leader for changing times. Born Alvertis Isbell in Brinkley, Arkansas, in 1940, he grew up in a rusting railway town situated halfway between Memphis and Little Rock, the state capital of Arkansas. He came of age as a teenager in the formative years of R&B, in the days of the single turntable, when, with his boundless imagination, he imagined running a radio station from his teenage bedroom. By force of his formidable personality, he began to secure bookings as a high-school DJ and guest slots on local radio stations. Bell’s teenage years coincided with dramatic events in the history of civil rights, especially the desegregation of schooling in Little Rock that shaped his beliefs. In 1957, when Bell was still only seventeen years old, the battle to desegregate Little Rock Central High School, once a bastion of white supremacy in the city, became a worldwide cause célèbre. A baying mob of over a thousand white protestors gathered along the intersections of 14th and Park, overlooking the faux-gothic grandeur of the high school, to prevent nine young black students from entering the building, in violation of a series of new laws which outlawed segregation in the education system. It was a stand-off that turned violent and political. The Little Rock controversy escalated to the White House, provoking an exchange of heated words between Arkansas state governor Orval Faubus and President Eisenhower, who had instructed the National Guard to protect the children and their parents. Images of paramilitaries lined up against small children carrying their school bags and fearfully holding their parents’ hands travelled the world and brought Faubus and the culture of segregation into international disgrace. Al Bell witnessed it all. At the time he was a DJ at high-school dances and proms across the Little Rock schools’ system, and the scenes nagged at his conscience, encouraging him to join the civil rights movement. When he graduated from high school, he enrolled at college and his first salaried job was at Radio Station KOKY, Little Rock’s first urban soul station, where he assumed the now familiar role of jive-talking shaman: ‘This is your six-feet-four bundle of joy, two hundred and twelve pounds of Miss Bell’s baby boy,’ he rapped, inducing the listeners to fall in love with the music and seducing them with his charm.
In a disarmingly honest interview with Andria Lisle in Wax Poetics, Bell talked about his young life: ‘Back in Arkansas, I worked for a white man who owned a grocery store and a fruit stand. I heard all the time, “Niggers can’t do nothing but sing and dance.” At first it bothered me – then I realized that singing and dancing is a multi-million-dollar industry. I lived in a segregated community that was permeated with racism, but when I DJ’d every morning, students from Central High School and Dunbar – its Black equivalent – would congregate and dance while I played records on the air. When the school crisis took place . . . I got a chance to see the attitudes of the European-American community. So in 1959, I’d dropped out of college in Little Rock and joined the SCLC [the Southern Christian Leadership Conference] leadership workshops, which were held in Midway, Georgia. At the time I carried a switchblade knife, and I was quite prolific in handling it. I went to Midway with that knife in my pocket. I didn’t have the passive resistance philosophy – if you attacked me, you could expect some kind of response. We were on a march in Savannah when a White gentleman said, “Nigger.” His spit hit my clothes, and before I could think, I pulled my switchblade out, broke rank and went after him.’ According to Bell, he lost control and retaliated, pursued through the crowd by SCLC leaders Hosea Williams and Ralph Abernathy, and was admonished for breaking one of the cardinal rules of the strictly non-violent SCLC. Bell claims that Martin Luther King spoke to him directly and criticised him fo
r brandishing a knife: ‘“Alvertis, you have some of the better qualities of Marcus Garvey,” he said, “but all those things must come later.” I replied, “Jesus had Peter with him – he carried a sword, so what’s the problem with my knife?” I respected Dr King, even though I didn’t totally believe him. I continued to support him because I loved him.’ Bell’s disagreements with King’s movement were not simply about violence but about a deeper underlying philosophy, a principle that led him to befriend Jesse Jackson and feel closer to the Chicago branch of the SCLC. Bell and Jackson had grown restless, unconvinced by silent protests and passive-resistance marches, and both believed that change was bound up in ownership, growing black businesses and extending job opportunities for young African-Americans.
Bell’s career as a staff member of SCLC began in 1959 and was short-lived. Although he continued to support King in public, he wanted to pursue the politics of economic emancipation. One of his earliest disputes with Stax was that the company was profiting from black music but was essentially white-owned. In sharp contrast to their northern rivals Motown, a company that was firmly in the grip of Berry Gordy and his formidable sisters, Stax remained in the control of a white southern family, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton.
Bell briefly worked as a DJ in Memphis in the early days of the sixties and was one of a throng of personalities who met around the counters of Satellite Records, angling for the best new releases for his show. Despite his unbridled self-confidence, Bell’s first attempt at running his own business was an abject failure. He moved from Little Rock to Memphis and on to Washington, where he set up a poorly distributed independent record label called Safice, an old-school soul label that released records by the Mystics, Roy Arlington and Bell’s long-time friend, Eddie Floyd. Floyd was a gifted vocalist who had left his native Alabama as part of the great migration north to Detroit and there he joined one of soul music’s great unheralded groups – the Falcons – sharing vocal leads with the impetuous Wilson Pickett and Jo Stubbs, the brother of Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops. Lost amidst the overabundance of competing talent in Detroit, Floyd eventually followed Bell to Washington and then on to Stax, where their careers ignited.
It was on the campus at Washington DC’s Howard University that Bell brazenly introduced himself to Carla Thomas, who was studying there at the time. He talked her into cutting some demos with Eddie Floyd at Bell’s radio station. Sold on their talent and determination, Carla Thomas mentioned the demos to her father Rufus and through him Bell was introduced to Stax. The offer of a job followed within weeks. He had been hired as Stax’s first full-time promotions officer, to plug a gap in the company’s workforce. By 1965, possibly earlier, the team at Stax had become sceptical of just how much Atlantic were promoting their product. ‘Business-wise we were getting lost in the shuffle,’ Steve Cropper admitted. ‘If a promotions guy walks into a radio station and he’s got six Atlantic records and one Stax record, what’s gonna happen?’ Bell was hired to bring that era of dependence to an end. His most obvious skill was in communications. His connections with DJs and radio stations across the country, particularly in the Delta region, were second to none. Furthermore, he had highly developed public-speaking skills, shaped by radio broadcasting and his days as a young political advocate at the SCLC. Articulate, self-confident and unrestrained by his initial lowly status at the company, Bell quickly became a senior employee and, ultimately, the driving force at Stax Records. His meteoric rise within the company was at best divisive: for some he was a passionate and inspirational leader; for others he had tipped a delicate balance and brought the creed of black ownership to the forefront of the company.
The extent of Bell’s influence was colossal and his passion for change burned like a torch. Until his arrival no one had tried to make sense of Stax as a significant force in African-American music. It had evolved and grown piecemeal, driven by its doomed distribution deal with Atlantic and the honey-dripping promises of Jerry Wexler. Bell filled a vacuum – he influenced artists’ development, oversaw the move to albums, drove the growth of a diversified portfolio of subsidiary labels, and jettisoned the homely old label design of dancing 45 rpm discs, replacing it with a more strident and streetwise design, the now iconic snapping finger. Booker T. Jones likened him to Otis Redding: ‘he had the same type of energy. He’d come into the room, pull up his shoulders and that energy would start. He would start talking about the music business or what was going on and he energized everywhere he was. He was our Otis for promotion.’ However, according to one Stax veteran, ‘he not only bore grudges, he nailed them to the office wall’. In a gesture of calculated revenge Bell encouraged the former gospel group Jeanne and the Darlings to record a derivative version of Sam and Dave’s hit song ‘Soul Man’ – the outcome was a stripped-back funk song knowingly called ‘Soul Girl’. Jim Stewart loved its latent energy, but most of all he loved its coded vengefulness and the idea that Stax, through its subsidiary label Volt, was giving two fingers to Jerry Wexler and Atlantic. A resentment was building that would not subside until long after 1968 was over.
To begin with, Bell spent the vast majority of his time on the road. He had identified Chicago as a breakout market, noting its huge urban sprawl, strong radio stations that played black music, and its political network via Jesse Jackson and Radio Station WVON (the self-styled ‘Voice of a Nation’) where DJ and programme director E. Rodney Jones and an excitable Stax enthusiast by the name of DJ Butterball helped with promotion. His days were spent sweet-talking DJs and bludgeoning store owners into stocking Stax records, but by 1967 he had recruited a small staff of regional promoters and returned full-time to Memphis. For a while, he shared an office with Jim Stewart, and they struck up an unlikely partnership – the garrulous and at times bombastic Bell and the quietly anxious company owner. ‘What was precious about working in that one office with Jim and spending so many hours with him was his determination to record and release authentic music,’ remarked Bell. Stewart’s dedication to Memphis blues artists and to the old ways took Bell by surprise. His appearance and his innate conservatism made Stewart easy to parody. He looked like someone who had mistakenly stumbled into the studio until the recording started, and then Bell saw in him a passion and determination that defied his appearance. Stewart was a relentless taskmaster, sometimes driving the studio band the M.G.’s into long and unforgiving nightshifts, railing at them for overcomplicating songs. His greatest asset of all was a Stax trademark: keep it simple.
Simplicity was Stax’s hidden virtue. Every Monday morning Bell established a short and highly focused creative meeting for all available staff. He asked what people had heard out at the weekends, in bars, clubs and on radio. Anything surfacing in the R&B or pop charts was assessed and then copied, and any new trend in the industry was hastily embraced. With the new label design, Bell fashioned a bold and overarching concept – ‘The Sound of Memphis’. It was derivative of Motown’s ‘Sound of Young America’ and came over as intensely arrogant to some of the other studios across the city, but it shouted of Stax’s ambition and new-found self-confidence. Within a few months of the new logo, and with the backbone of a new distribution network in place, Stax released a string of successful singles, including Johnnie Taylor’s ‘Who’s Making Love’, Eddie Floyd’s cover version of the old Sam Cooke classic ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ and one of Stax’s most successful records ever, William Bell and Judy Clay’s ‘Private Number’, a love duet that unashamedly crashed into a market previously dominated by Motown’s Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell and Wand’s Chuck Jackson and Maxine Brown.
‘Private Number’ reached the Top Twenty in the American R&B charts, but more persuasively it stormed the charts in Europe, peaking at number eight in Britain, where it became a nightclub classic. Yet it was not Judy Clay’s first attempt at a love duet. Controversially, at Atlantic, she had been paired with a white singer, Billy Vera, in what was touted as America’s first interracial pop couple. The idea backfired. Badly. Ma
ny radio stations refused to playlist their song, there was a blanket television ban on appearances, and most of the nation’s press avoided what was perceived by many as risky subject matter. The contentious coupling was exacerbated by a virulent rumour that Clay was pregnant with Vera’s child; in fact she was pregnant by her husband, the jazz drummer Leo Gatewood. To add insult to injury, the duo’s best song, ‘Storybook Children’, was eventually performed on network TV by all-white couple Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. Frustrated by the racist attitudes still prevailing in the mainstream, Clay was dealt a second blow. She was signed to Stax, and Vera to Atlantic, and the war between the two companies eventually broke up their partnership. Judy Clay, like Don Covay and Wilson Pickett, was seen as a ‘difficult’ artist and her prickliness in the recording studio, driven as much by perfectionism as much as pettiness, left her short of allies. Despite the cult status and popular success of ‘Private Number’, she was eventually released from her contract, the first of a series of setbacks that blighted her career. According to her son, whom she bore during the controversy, failure in the industry scarred her emotionally for the rest of her life. Clay had once sung with the most formidable of all the gospel groups, the Drinkard Family, which produced Cissy Houston, sisters Dee Dee and Dionne Warwick, and provided the nucleus of the supergroup of backing singers the Sweet Inspirations. Clay watched as their careers evolved and it hurt. ‘I can’t communicate to you how much of an issue it was to my mother to not have her career,’ Leo Gatewood Jr said, on his mother’s passing in 2001. ‘It was an overriding theme in our house, so much so that as a child, I would try not to let her see any award shows, because she would openly cry. She’d see somebody like Patti LaBelle or Aretha on TV, and try to comment. But you could see it crushed her. That never changed.’
Memphis 68 Page 20