Life in the ghetto was compared unfavourably to a celebrity baby that was already gripping the attention of the press even before birth. Actress and international starlet Sophia Loren was eight months pregnant. After a series of miscarriages, her new unborn child was being tagged ‘the richest baby in the world’. Loren’s husband, film producer Carlo Ponti, had recently overseen the most popular and financially successful films of all time: David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, the quintessential Swinging Sixties film. Famous, and fabulously wealthy, Ponti put in place a remarkable prenatal plan to protect Loren from further miscarriage. At the time, the couple were romantically on the run. Ponti had divorced his first wife at a time when divorce was still technically illegal in Catholic Italy and so lived across the border in Switzerland as a bigamist-in-exile. Sophia Loren for her part was living in ‘concubinage’ – her relationship unrecognised under Italian law. To provide a safe haven for his pregnant partner, Ponti had hired three adjacent villa-apartments in Geneva, at an estimated cost of $1.4 million, and had kitted out the villas with $960,000 of medical equipment. Ponti had hand-picked the villas for their proximity to Geneva’s Cantonal Hospital, where the world-renowned gynaecologist Professor Hubert de Watteville practised. De Watteville was the president of the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, and a world expert on difficult births. A son, Carlo Ponti Jr, now a renowned classical composer and concert conductor, was born on 29 December 1968. It was the same day that an infant boy from South Memphis was swaddled in blankets and taken by car to a funeral parlour, where he lay on the lap of his disabled mother, crying unknowingly for a dead father.
On 30 December, as the year ended, one of the last court cases of 1968 featured a group of Memphis Invaders charged with assault. Horace Hall, who was brought to the court from Shelby County Jail where he had been incarcerated on previous charges, was accused of pulling a pistol and threatening the night manager of the Jump & Grab Drive-In Grocery, 591 E.H. Crump, just before midnight on 29 November. It was a case that hinged on the meaning of a short but highly combustible word – ‘boy’. Hall had overheard the night manager using the word ‘boy’ to a fourteen-year-old black assistant and resented what he considered a racist slur. An argument ensured. The Invaders were all found guilty of brandishing weapons and causing a disturbance, but, significantly, the most infamous among them, Lance ‘Sweet Willie Wine’ Watson, not only denied the charges but refused to acknowledge the use of the term ‘Invaders’. He claimed to be a leader of an entirely new militant group – the Black United Front. Watson was a character who fascinated local journalists; one described him as ‘wearing a blue, green and brown poncho, draped over his shoulders, of the kind worn by the Manish tribe in Africa’. Watson and another co-accused, Robert ‘Cornbread’ Wilson, both spoke of their new-found African origins, an early sign that the Invaders were transforming: the group’s original leaders were incarcerated and new recruits were exchanging their community radicalism for Afrocentrism. On the last day of the year, all of the Memphis militants failed to make bond and were taken to the Shelby County Penal Farm, where many other members of the Invaders were already imprisoned. By the end of 1968 the Memphis Invaders, who for nearly two years now had scared the authorities and provoked genuine fear of insurrection, were in decline and faced near annihilation. With many of the founders in jail and others scared off by persistent police harassment, new members who came to the group in 1968 had joined an organisation that was short of resources, had been infiltrated by the FBI, and was hounded daily by the police. Ultimately they were compromised by their own mistakes and snagged by the most basic of shortcomings – they had next to no money and were floored as much by cash flow as overzealous policing.
Cash flow was also proving a problem for Stax. In late December they had hosted a poorly attended Christmas concert at the Mid-South Coliseum. The event was ill conceived, having tried to reach out to the local counter-culture by hiring Janis Joplin and her newly assembled band, the Kozmic Blues Band, to headline. Joplin had recently left Big Brother and the Holding Company, and was flourishing on the new festival circuit and among the alternative clubs on the west coast. She had become obsessed with the Stax sound and, according to those close to her, would play Carla Thomas records forty times in a row, scratching the disc and destroying styluses as she tried to identify sequences that most impressed her.
Bill King, briefly the Kozmic Blues Band’s pianist and musical director, recorded a diary of their trip to appear at the Memphis show. ‘A rehearsal was set for mid afternoon, 20 December, at Soulsville U.S.A. Studios. First sight of the shattered movie marquee made me question if we’d been driven to the wrong location. I would eventually learn the broken panes of glass were fronting an immensely successful, sophisticated operation. As the doors spring open a cacophony of sounds unleash while several bands put the final touches to performance material. We wait until Booker T. and the M.G.’s complete a run through of prepared concert material then take positions behind our respective instruments. It was truly one of the most awkward situations I’d ever been in. First, the studio floor was on a slope due to its previous incarnation as a public cinema. Secondly, the number of certified super stars walking about not only excited but also added a level of intimidation. I mean these were my big heroes.’
King’s diary provides some clues as to why the Coliseum show failed in such a calamitous way. ‘After a complete run through we drove on to the Coliseum for set up. The sound check was a disaster. With an event [of this] magnitude you would have assumed the promoters would have spent decent coin to rent adequate amplification. Instead, they propped up a couple column speakers found mostly in rural churches at the time. Enough wattage for a sermon but not reliable enough to carry the power of a raucous singer. Janis was flabbergasted. To compound matters, she spotted a poster of the event with her image and name posted larger than the other participants. The thought of headlining amongst such prestigious talent sent her into an apologetic rant.’
The concert was a disaster. Al Bell had called it wrong. All the major Stax acts were on the bill, but many of them, including the Bar-Kays who were the featured group at the Tiki on Bellevue, had local residencies, and so were already familiar to core fans. Joplin was all but irrelevant to black audiences, and the audience she normally attracted did not exist in sufficient numbers and stayed away. Stax lost out. Paying the musicians’ bloated bill and funding the loss to the Coliseum proved tricky but it was nothing compared to the cash shortfalls to come. Bell had borrowed the idea of an annual Stax homecoming show from Motown, who staged an annual week of spectaculars at the Fox Theater in Detroit. But another idea – again borrowed from Motown – proved to be more successful. Bell was an admirer of Motown’s annual sales convention, a major opportunity for the company to showcase its artists and new releases in one spectacular event. Using the ballrooms of the Rivermont Hotel, he earmarked 16–18 May 1969 as the dates when twenty-eight albums would be unveiled, all with accompanying singles. Work began in November 1968, and for a relentless six months Stax never slept. It was at the May 1969 convention that Isaac Hayes’ virtuoso performance of ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ thrilled the visiting buyers and brought his album Hot Buttered Soul to the top of the pile. What began as a flicker of interest ignited into a flame, and by the end of 1969, in an unforeseen surge of success, the album featured on four charts simultaneously: jazz, easy listening, R&B and pop. Somehow, magically and improbably, it had appeal to them all.
In the run-up to Christmas, Stax boss Jim Stewart and his wife moved into a new suburban mansion on the outskirts of Memphis. The couple threw a house-warming party that must rank as one of the truly bizarre events in the history of soul music. Secluded in an exclusively white neighbourhood, and recently decorated with snow-white carpets and the latest fashionable furniture, it was a home that oozed wealth. The couple did the decent thing and invited their new neighbours and work colleagues. The party wa
s not only a clash of cultures but a theatre of the bizarre: Rufus Thomas in a gangster-pin tie; members of the Bar-Kays in polyester leggings and fur coats; Isaac Hayes in an ocelot suit; and the Stax security force in razor-sharp suits, dark shades and stone-cold killer shoes. The neighbours – bless them – were politely dressed in sober standard-management suits and understated cocktail dresses. Then, stumbling into an already high-octane environment, came one of rock music’s most troubled souls – the singer and heroin addict Janis Joplin. With her unkempt hair, her satin blouse stained with drink, hippie beads hanging down to her waist and ostrich feathers decorating her wrists, Joplin, in the withering words of the magazine Rolling Stone, looked like ‘a Babylonian whore’. According to Peggy Caserta, Joplin’s friend and occasional lover, by late 1968 Joplin was shooting at least $200 worth of heroin daily and downing Southern Comfort as if it were soda water. Between the summer of 1968 and late 1969, Joplin reportedly overdosed six times, and, according to her friend, the virtuoso blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield, she was snared by full-blown addiction. ‘A junkie’s life is totally fucked,’ he said, speaking of Joplin. ‘Shooting junk made everything else seem unimportant.’
Sometime after midnight, as the party edged further into discomfort, Joplin began stubbing out her cigarettes on the brand-new carpet, and she was eventually asked to leave by Jim Stewart’s furious wife. Joplin left Memphis soon after, never to return. One of rock music’s most tragic characters, in September 1970, only twenty-seven, Joplin died of an accidental overdose in the Landmark Hotel, Hollywood, clutching some change from the cigarette machine. Her obituary in the New York Times described the white woman who saw Stax as the pinnacle of all that was brilliant in modern music. ‘She would stand before her audience, microphone in hand, long red hair flailing, her raspy voice shrieking in rock mutations of black country blues. Pellets of sweat flew from her contorted face and glittered in the beam of footlights. Janis Joplin sang with more than her voice. Her involvement was total.’
Jim Stewart, resplendent in a brilliant white suit, reluctantly called his guests together. By way of a toast to his new home, he reflected on a year that had been among the most tumultuous in recent history. Never a great public speaker, he did what many have done before and since – focused on the good news, the company’s achievements and the hit records. He thanked those who had contributed to the Stax sound and what was once again a renewed and growing business. But what was left unsaid still bruised him. The divorce from Atlantic had been bitter and costly, and the loss of the precious back catalogue bore heavily on him. The death of Otis Redding, exactly a year before, still left an aching gap at Stax, and although Johnnie Taylor and, latterly, Isaac Hayes would emerge from the studio to seize international fame, that was yet to come. The death of Martin Luther King still weighed heavy on Memphis, too, and the stigma would linger for decades. Stewart lived and breathed Stax, and as he wandered from room to room he quietly, almost shyly, paid tribute to those living and dead who had played such a vital part in the Stax success story. He often came close to calling it an empire, but there was a modest side to his personality that could not quite use the word; maybe because he thought it was too arrogant or, more likely, that he was intelligent enough to know that empires rise and then just as dramatically fall.
By the close of 1968 the Stax empire was discovering an emperor in its midst. The year had begun with the pathetic sight of Ben Cauley trying to fight off tears as journalists probed him for details of the tragic plane crash that killed Otis Redding. Rather than retreat, Cauley and his friend, bassist James Alexander, agreed that giving up was not an option, and so they slowly but surely began to rebuild the Bar-Kays. The brother of dead drummer Carl Cunningham was drafted in and so, too, were other close friends, and quietly the group was reimagined as pioneers of street funk. The Bar-Kays had always been an ultra-reliable backing band, but by the end of 1968 they resurfaced as a formidable act in their own right, eventually hiring their first dedicated lead vocalist, Larry Dodson, from rival Memphis group the Temprees, and putting in place a new vision of a group that went on to record the hard-edged disco classic ‘Shake Your Rump To The Funk’. By December the Bar-Kays were back recording at the Stax studios and at weekends holding down a profitable residency at the Tiki Club, an African-American nightclub on Bellevue, which at the time was owned by a local music operator, Gene Mason, a helpful mentor in the band’s re-emergence.
It was at the Tiki Club that soul history was made. Isaac Hayes had been flirting with recording an album for months and was considering a new wave of songs. For reasons now long buried in time, he began to favour great songs he knew and liked rather than record songs he had written with his long-time songwriting partner David Porter. Two of his favourite songs of the time were Burt Bacharach’s ‘Walk On By’, which had been a hit for Dionne Warwick in 1964, and Jimmy Webb’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’, which, by 1968, was a country classic most readily associated with the singer Glen Campbell. Neither song shouted soul. Nor were they ones that audiences associated with the Stax sound. Nonetheless, Hayes rightly championed them as great songwriting and, in the anything-goes era at Stax as the soul explosion smashed apart categories and expectations, he was given late-night studio time to record them. The songs were probably conceived as traditional cover versions and, in the minds of Al Bell and Jim Stewart, would be no more than filler tracks for an Isaac Hayes album. But something unpredictable and magical happened. Hayes asked the Bar-Kays if he could join them at the Tiki Club to try out new material. He took to the stage in front of a noisy and inattentive crowd. Rather than launch straight into his first number –‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ – Hayes paused and asked the new Bar-Kays to strike up a long repetitive loop of percussive funk, and then he began to tell a story in a spoken rap style now so familiar to black music you might forget it had to be invented. Hayes started to imagine the story of the man travelling to Phoenix. What has driven him there? How did he get there? And what was he escaping from? Rather than honour the original song and make the driver white, Hayes cast him as a young black man escaping from LA and making an intense, frenetic journey to Phoenix, Arizona. Frank Sinatra called it ‘the greatest torch song ever’, and, along with Gladys Knight’s ‘Midnight Train To Georgia’ and Millie Jackson’s ‘If You’re Not Back In Love By Monday’, it remains one of the most complex love songs – a mesmerising piece of soul alchemy that took classic Nashville and reimagined it as Memphis soul.
The audience at the Tiki Club took a while to settle, but gradually they quietened, and, finally, as silence reigned amongst the once rowdy tables, Hayes launched into the song proper. The rapped intro became a trademark device for decades to come, but more importantly Hayes returned to the studio with the Bar-Kays and fashioned Hot Buttered Soul, a formidable act of musical deconstruction that fast-tracked his career and gave birth to the concept album and new ways of seeing black American music. The album contained only four lengthy tracks: a reinterpretation of ‘Walk On By’; a song called ‘One Woman’; an epic rendition of ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ that stretched to nearly nineteen minutes in length; and the surreally named ‘Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic’, which, at a modest ten minutes, ended the first side and was later sampled by Public Enemy, Ice Cube and many others. As Hayes expressed in Rolling Stone in 1972: ‘I felt like what I wanted to say, I couldn’t say it in no two minutes and thirty seconds, because I wanted to speak through the arrangement, I wanted to speak through singing . . . I cut that record with all the freedom in the world and it was a beautiful release for me.’ With the obvious exception of jazz, most forms of popular black music had been constrained by the needs of commercialism and the demands of radio stations. Motown had perfected telling stories of teenage love in under three minutes and not until Hayes broke the mould had any soul artist ever dared to extend songs or disrupt the rules of the marketplace.
Hot Buttered Soul had its origins in the fertile months of 1968, as Hayes tr
ied to shake himself out of what was in many respects a breakdown, triggered in part by the circumstances of Martin Luther King’s death and his proximity to the events. But it was equally a product of his own unfettered self-confidence. Born into abject poverty, he now had a modicum of wealth; unsure whether he was a songwriter or a performer, he had a chance to take centre stage. Raised and then rejected by a high school that favoured jazz over R&B, he realised that it was a false choice he was no longer obliged to make. Hot Buttered Soul is in some respects a jazz album forged in the furnace of soul. Composed mostly of free-form cover versions, it is bravely disruptive and broke all the cardinal rules of the radio stations of the day. The tracks are too long to satisfy playlists, and the vocal hooklines are tangled in looping and adventurous backing tracks. But what is rarely said about the album is that it is visionary in the true sense of the word: it anticipates the future of black music. The long rapped intros point not only to jazz-funk and rap itself, but to the soliloquies of bedroom soul pioneered by the great women artists of the seventies, including Millie Jackson, Denise LaSalle, Doris Duke and Shirley Brown. Something about its laconic and almost druggy tone looks forward to trip-hop and the ambient soul that found a flourishing electronic heart in the UK’s ‘Bristol sound’, with artists like Portishead and Massive Attack. And, most clearly of all, Hot Buttered Soul was the flag-bearer for concept albums in the black music market and the LP that gave permission to Marvin Gaye and What’s Going On, Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain and Swamp Dogg’s Cuffed, Collared & Tagged. It broke decisively with the racist presumption that soul and R&B artists were best suited to the singles market and that only white rock musicians could cope with the demands of the album. The basic tracks were recorded at Memphis’s Ardent Studios – Stax was already straining with the weight of bookings – and then Hayes worked with the producer Dale Warren, a classically trained violinist who had joined Stax from the Motown empire. Warren convinced Hayes that they should head to the Motor City, where they hired East European émigrés working for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to add elegance, depth and unexpected subtlety to the score. This was Stax like never before – a gut-bucket southern soul sound reimagined. But it was also soul like never before – creative, disruptive and unconcerned with the limitations that the marketplace had traditionally heaped on black music. Hayes had in many respects coincided with the growth of Memphis soul, having emerged from the ranks of local high-school talent contests and basic studio work to become one of Stax’s most reliable writers. It might have ended there, with a comfortable career as a studio producer, but Hayes had one last transformation to come: the frenzy of fame.
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