Underlying finances at Stax were still precarious and in a way always would be. As Estelle Axton and Jim Stewart shopped around for a new partner who could close the gap left by the severance of their deal with Atlantic, Bell played a prominent new role as broker. There had been several near-misses, but deals with MGM, MCA and ABC had all driven into the sand, and so Bell recommended that Stax hire the services of one of black music’s major sorcerers, Clarence Avant, an industry stalwart who was formerly the manager of R&B titan Little Willie John and jazz star Sarah Vaughan. Bell and Avant had met at the annual National Association of Television and Radio Announcers (NATRA) convention held in Atlanta in August 1967. The convention was a landmark event in the soul calendar – ‘where DJs came to argue’. Five hundred disc jockeys and most of the independent label owners attended the event at the newly built Hyatt Regency, where the organisers had made the decision to shine a light on the burgeoning southern scene and particularly on the rising tide of Otis Redding. It seemed that soul music was splitting along regional lines. The massive northern cities of Chicago and Detroit were now rivalled by the southern cities of Memphis and Atlanta. It was a turning point in the industry and a moment for reflection on the hard racially divisive realities. Up to 500 radio stations across America targeted largely African-American communities, but only four of them were black owned. According to one extant report, ‘a revolt is slowly building up among more than 1,500 Negro disc jockeys from coast to coast, who are “fed up” with the slave conditions under which many of them work . . . Secret sessions are being held between them to decide on a course of action to win for themselves a bigger share of the pie.’
Many of black entertainment’s biggest stars, including Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Nina Simone, Jackie Wilson and former Motown singer Kim Weston, were also in town. At NATRA’s opening Friday-night dinner hosted by RCA Records, Dr Martin Luther King delivered the keynote speech. Reflecting on a summer of riots, he rehearsed sentiments that he would repeat on television and at the SCLC in Atlanta five days later. ‘I refuse to allow myself to fall into the dark chambers of pessimism . . . The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots . . . There is certainly something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. And deep down within them, you can see a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.’ His speech inspired Florence Greenberg, the founder of the New York R&B labels Scepter and Wand, who was there representing Dionne Warwick, Chuck Jackson, Tommy Hunt and Nella Dodds. Upon her return home to New York, she penned a personal note of thanks to King and enclosed a donation to his cause. But King’s speech about the futility of violence was met with mixed feelings; it was far too cautious for some in the room. African- American politics were increasingly fragmenting along violent and non-violent lines. Student firebrand H. Rap Brown arrived at the convention to try to convince soul music’s most versatile DJs to embrace a more militant message, and to become voices for change in ghetto communities. By the time of the next NATRA convention, held in August 1968 in Miami, violence would erupt and drive a wedge through the industry that damaged soul music and demonised the genre for some record labels.
As Bell and Avant drank together in 1967, they talked about the deals that Stax might strike. At the time, Avant had just concluded a deal incorporating Venture Records in California, the first joint venture between African-American artists and a major record company. Impressed, Bell enlisted his help to broker a deal with yet another conglomerate in a move that brought Stax under the control of an irrepressible and eccentric mogul known as ‘The Mad Austrian’ – the boss of Gulf & Western, ‘Hurricane Charlie’ Bluhdorn. Bluhdorn was a force of nature who acquired businesses as if they were toys (150 over his lifetime). Vanity Fair described him as ‘rapacious, combustible, and passionate, a man who routinely made the impossible happen as he built his Gulf & Western empire’. He was a man obsessed with deals. ‘Some people like golf, Charlie liked to acquire things,’ Jack Valenti, the Motion Picture Association of America president, once said. ‘Making a deal to him was one orgasm after another.’
Back in 1965, in the midst of Otis Redding’s most prolific year as a barnstorming R&B singer, Stax’s Volt subsidiary had released the so-called ‘fab four’ – Redding’s quartet of great singles: ‘Mr Pitiful’, ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)’, ‘Respect’ and ‘I Can’t Turn You Loose’. As Redding’s star was in the ascendancy, Bluhdorn was voraciously buying up failing companies in the automobile supplies industry. In one audacious corporate swoop, he borrowed $84 million, then the largest unsecured loan in US history, from Chase Manhattan, and purchased a struggling corporation called New Jersey Zinc. The president woke up one day to find he had a new boss and claimed, ‘The more you work for Charlie Bluhdorn, the closer you are to the moon.’ It was a prescient description that captured Bluhdorn’s soaring ambition and his lunar madness. With each new week he identified more failing or vulnerable companies to snap up and turn around. His biggest success came when he bought a dead-end company in Grand Rapids called Michigan Plating & Stamping, which had consistently failed to turn a profit but had one lucrative long-term contract producing rear bumpers for Studebakers.
Bluhdorn had arrived in America as an Austrian immigrant in the early years of Hitler’s rise to power. He allowed people to think he had escaped persecution as a Jew although no one was ever sure if he was actually Jewish. Throughout his life he was fiercely patriotic and forced his children to watch The Sound of Music nightly, to witness – again and again – how the Austrian family and the emotional passions of ‘Edelweiss’ tricked the encroaching Nazis. In 1966 he rocked the movie industry by buying up the failing Hollywood studio Paramount, which had not had a hit since Psycho in 1960. At the time of the deal, the film industry, wary of outsiders and sneering in its attitude to the seemingly unsophisticated, had scoffed at Bluhdorn, believing he had only struck the Paramount deal to gain access to a glamour that his other businesses could never deliver. Hollywood was baffled by the transaction and claimed it was ‘the biggest purchase for pussy in the history of America’. Bluhdorn may well have been vulnerable to passing beauty, but his motives were always more calculating. Miraculously, he turned the ailing studio into a hit factory with Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972) and Chinatown (1974), but beyond the box office hits lay a more lucrative undercarriage. Paramount owned thousands of old movies, ripe for re-running in the emergent network television market. Bluhdorn slapped a television licence value of $200 million on its accounts, virtually transforming its commercial credibility. The writer Robert Sam Anson, who meticulously pieced together Bluhdorn’s corporate history as it zigzagged across America and into nearly every sector of the economy, summarised his success in one simple phrase. Bluhdorn, the ultimate turnaround king, had once told him: ‘I buy things no one else wants.’
Difficult as it was for the leadership of Stax to admit, they fitted the profile. Stax had been edged out of a deal with Atlantic and Warner Brothers and had exhausted a list of other potential suitors. It had become a company ‘no one wanted’ in a high-risk industry littered with corporate failure. Having lost its back catalogue and many of its most bankable stars to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, Stax was also perceived to have been naïve, unaware of the depth charges that lay beneath the choppy waters of its relationship with Atlantic. It was an exciting but risky business in a declining neighbourhood of a now notorious city. Bluhdorn had precious little time to devote to Stax, but his hunch was that it had found talent before and could do so again. He also liked something else about the label – it had resonance. Wherever he went in America, and even Europe, people had heard of it. Stax’s deal with Gulf & Western was finalised on 29 May 1968 for $4.3 million. The broker, Clarence Avant, received ten per cent of all debentures and Stax’s original founders Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton became majority sharehold
ers. Their talented executive Al Bell became a minority stockholder, the first African-American to own a share of a company that was steeped in the deep soul of black music.
In May 1968, Billboard, the music industry’s business bible, greeted the takeover with cautious optimism. ‘Jim Stewart will continue to helm Stax/Volt companies, reporting to Arnold D. Burk, Paramount Pictures vice-president in charge of music operation,’ a front-page feature informed, going on to confirm that Stax would continue to be distributed by independents and that Paramount would not take on the cost of building a distribution network. Although the deal has been retrospectively criticised for undervaluing Stax and not bringing enough cash into the company, it acted as a significant confidence boost, bringing uncertainty to an end and stimulating further growth. Stax had been sold for $4.3 million, the majority of which was paid in Gulf & Western stock, but at least for a time there was cash in the company.
Although there is no evidence, either factual or anecdotal, that Charlie Bluhdorn ever visited the Stax studios, his reputation swept through the corridors, and the company found itself in the challenging situation of having to report on a monthly basis to the corporate headquarters of Gulf & Western in Manhattan via its Paramount entertainment subsidiary in Hollywood. It was overly complex from the outset. Stax had to accept management oversight from a company that barely understood the culture, let alone the cut-throat business of R&B. For a while it was able to operate below the radar of corporate control but that was never likely to last, and slowly but surely the internal culture at East McLemore changed. Using the money that Gulf & Western had invested, Bell embarked on an audacious expansion scheme – ‘The Soul Explosion’ – that launched thirty singles and twenty-eight albums in under a year. The winds of change blew many certainties away. Stax no longer remained fixated with Memphis; it increasingly recorded in Detroit and opened an office in Los Angeles, and in a move that was to kindle mixed emotions, the company hired the talented Detroit producer Don Davis to bring the gloss of Motor City soul to the south.
Beyond business growth, Bell began to implement some of his own long-held beliefs in building a black business and immediately advocated greater recruitment of black staff. The new era was unsettling for some. Estelle Axton felt that the white employees who had helped build the company deserved rewards, too. With substantial evidence on her side, she cited the fact that producer and songwriter Steve Cropper had contributed as much to the Stax story as Bell had. It was a view driven by more than sentimentality. Although Cropper had worked beside her in the Satellite Records store and was a close personal friend, he had also been a driving force in the studio, where he had worked tirelessly as guitarist with Booker T. and the M.G.’s. He co-wrote some of Stax’s most durable songs, among them Eddie Floyd’s ‘Knock On Wood’, Wilson Pickett’s ‘In The Midnight Hour’ and Otis Redding’s requiem ‘(Sittin On) The Dock Of The Bay’. But there was, naturally, a touch of sentimentality. Cropper was a friend and collaborator with Axton’s wayward son Packy, whom she felt had been shortchanged and then ostracised by Stax and by her own brother. It was a sore that had never healed.
Internal strife at Stax had become like Memphis in miniature. Arguments about race and ethnicity were tied up in a confused ball of divided loyalties. Jim Stewart told the Memphis-based writer Robert Gordon that he felt conflicted and caught between business and family. ‘I had a decision to make,’ he said, ‘a very hard decision to make. It involved family versus the company – a very hard choice. Al and my sister did not get along, and it had gotten to the point where Al was ready to leave. In the end I made the decision that more people’s livelihoods were at stake than just mine and asked my sister to step down.’ Although the racial tensions within Stax and Al Bell’s elevated role brought ill-feeling to the surface, in truth Estelle Axton had felt directionless, undervalued and underused for several years. When the departure came it was with all the bitterness that had been welling up for some time. Local music lawyer Seymour Rosenberg, a teenage friend of Jim Stewart, orchestrated a final legal settlement. He hired a suite at the Holiday Inn Rivermont and locked the warring parties in adjacent rooms, shuttling from one suite to another until the lawyers of Gulf & Western, who had flown in for the day from New York, negotiated a severance package with Axton’s local lawyers. The so-called ‘redistribution of earn-out agreement’ gave Estelle Axton $490,000 for her stake in Stax but left her feeling unfulfilled. She invested in a luxury apartment but no longer had the heart to drive along East McLemore, past the store front that had once played host to Satellite Records, the shop that begat Stax. ‘I decided to take the money and run,’ she said. But there were strict limitations on where she could run. A do-not-compete clause in her severance deal meant that she was unable to work in the music industry – not even to open another record store – for a period of five years.
Martin Luther King’s assassination and Al Bell’s eventual consolidation of power at Stax had many unforeseen consequences. One of the most obvious was a shift in the cultural locus of the company. Stax had emerged out of hillbilly roots, integrated a creative and under-represented local community of black artists, and established itself as the most dynamic force in a city founded on segregation. By 1968 it was moving inexorably towards an era where greater black ownership and assertiveness would become a daily reality. First and foremost, there was social change. The civil rights movement, with its tones of Christian tolerance and passive resistance, had reached a point of crisis with King’s death and unlocked more strident voices for Black Power. This was not just theatrical protest or activist posturing, it reached deep into the company’s culture. Al Bell had been a passionate and consistent advocate of greater change in the workplace, believing that major companies across the country had to step up to the plate and increase their recruitment of black staff. Now he was in a position to put his beliefs into practice, he made it happen. Black recruitment at Stax increased in numbers across all roles, from security to the secretariat to creative leadership. Bell also forged more direct links with opinion formers within the black community, reassuring the ever cautious Jim Stewart as he went.
Bell’s views were most persuasively espoused by Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket movement, the Chicago-based spin-out from the SCLC, which was committed to taking civil rights into the local economy and the workplace. Jackson’s career was in the ascendancy, and after disputes with the SCLC he set up an entirely new pressure group PUSH – a grandiose acronym for People United to Save Humanity. PUSH was committed to black self-help and had alliances with the soul DJ network NATRA, which was turning the heat up on record companies, demanding greater royalties for black artists and increased visibility of African-Americans in management and ownership roles.
Change was everywhere and Stax tried to adjust. But it was never a hapless victim of Black Power, not in any crude sense of that term. Like many record companies of the time, Stax felt both the pressure and the desire to react to new times and new markets. In that respect, Al Bell was both an advocate and a beneficiary. He believed passionately in greater power for black people in the workplace and, of course, he personally gained from change.
The new mood of black assertiveness made the everyday working environment less cosy but it also laid the foundations for one of Stax’s greatest achievements, the toweringly important Wattstax: a festival, a political rally and an innovative documentary film. Wattstax grew directly from Stax’s expansion to the west coast. Like Motown before them, the Memphis company had come to realise that opportunities in and around Hollywood were ripe for exploitation, and that the mountain would never come to Mohammad. If they waited for Hollywood to discover Memphis, it would be a long wait. Now part of the Gulf & Western conglomerate, Stax opened up a small Los Angeles office managed by Forest Hamilton Jr, the son of jazz drummer Chico Hamilton and a man described by some Stax veterans as ‘frustratingly pushy’.
Wattstax had its origins in social disruption. In August 1965 gangs of black Angel
inos had hurled bricks, bottles and improvised Molotov cocktails at a unit of the hated LAPD after the violent arrest of a suspected drunk driver in the Watts neighbourhood. Rioting swept across the ghetto, leaving 34 dead, 1,032 injured and almost 4,000 individuals arrested. At a time when cool heads were needed, the police chief William Parker infamously compared the rioters to ‘monkeys in a zoo’. Yet, out of the rubble a few green shoots grew. The Watts Writers Group, the Compton Communicative Arts Academy and Watts Towers Arts Center created a cultural foundation that produced an annual summer festival, the first of which was held in the gym of Jordan High School on East 103rd Street in 1965. It was a small amateur community affair but with Stax’s involvement it grew into the biggest festival of black music ever. Often mistakenly described as the black Woodstock, Wattstax was not aimed at the new counterculture: quite the opposite, it was aimed at a burgeoning black neighbourhood, one of the most deprived in the USA. The entry fee was pegged at one dollar to ensure that even the poorest families could come along. The idea began when two members of the Watts-based Mafundi Institute, a black nationalist arts group, contacted Forest Hamilton Jr about sponsoring a concert in the local Will Rogers Park. What began as a simple request for help and some cash grew into a concept – that Stax would showcase its roster of artists to the west coast. As the event grew in stature, the park could no longer contain Stax’s vision and Wattstax eventually relocated to the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1972, attracting an audience of 112,000 and becoming one of the most remarkable concerts in the history of soul music.
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