“Those parties were huge affairs,” says Jim’s niece Doris, Estelle’s daughter. “Jim went through a period where he was king of the hill. Mother wouldn’t go to the parties, but they continued to see each other at their parents’ house in Middleton, for Christmas and Thanksgiving. My mother was hurt, but there was never any not-speaking. She was able to be cordial and carry on.” In his big spread, Jim feted Julian Bond and Dick Gregory, bringing in African-American leaders from Atlanta, Chicago, and Memphis. Stax was working every front it could, affirming its vitality, announcing its expansive future.
The company’s success, noted Jim, was rooted in his partnership. “Because of my background as a banker and businessman, I’m considered a conservative, while Al Bell, a wheeler and dealer, is just the opposite. He’s liberal,” Jim wrote in a magazine piece. “Here we are, two opposites with the same goals. Put us together and you have perfect equilibrium . . . If we’ve done nothing more, we’ve shown the world that people of different colors, origins, and convictions can be as one, working together towards the same goal. Because we’ve learned how to live and work together at Stax Records, we’ve reaped many material benefits. But, most of all, we’ve acquired peace of mind. When hate and resentment break out all over the nation, we pull our blinds and display a sign that reads ‘Look What We’ve Done—TOGETHER.’”
Al Bell was on a signing spree, building a wide and diverse roster. His inspiration was the Vee-Jay label, an indie from Chicago founded by two African-Americans, Vivian Carter and Jimmy Bracken (it went bankrupt in 1966). “I aspired to have a label that was as diverse as Vee-Jay,” Al explains. “They had soul music: Jerry Butler and the Impressions. They had blues: Jimmy Reed, Memphis Slim. They had gospel: the Staple Singers, the Swan Silvertones. They had pop: Gene Chandler with ‘The Duke of Earl,’ and they had the Beatles before Capitol exercised its option.”
Early in 1969, Pervis Staples brought a young Chicago gospel group to Stax. The Hutchinson Sunbeams, three sisters, wanted to go secular, and Pervis convinced them to do like the Staple Singers and join Stax. “We’re trying to carry a freedom message,” Pervis said, explaining that the move from gospel to pop didn’t have to be as radical as some feared. “One reason we changed our way of singing from straight gospel to this new style is ’cause we want to reach more people. And it’s for sure we wouldn’t have gotten to all the concert halls we’ve played so far as a pure gospel group.” The Hutchinson Sunbeams changed their name to the Emotions, and with “So I Can Love You,” a classic Hayes and Porter soul-drenched production, they landed a top-five R&B hit the first time out, crossing over to the pop top forty.
In February, Stax shone at the 1969 Grammy Awards, the nominations including Johnnie Taylor (who’d performed the previous month at President Nixon’s inaugural ball), the Staple Singers, Sam and Dave, and writers Bettye Crutcher, Raymond Jackson, and Homer Banks; Otis Redding won Best R&B Vocal Performance for “Dock of the Bay,” and he and Steve Cropper won as writers for Best R&B Song.
New label distribution deals were announced, more in-house labels were created—Hip, for pop acts, and Enterprise, a jazz and catchall label named for the galaxy-traveling spaceship on Al’s favorite TV show, Star Trek. The hubbub of activity and the accompanying expenditures were so astonishing that Gulf & Western sent representatives from Paramount to see what its new subsidiary was doing. “Almost immediately there was some friction between the executives at Paramount and us,” Jim remembers. “They wanted to control the company, basically.”
“One day in my office on Chelsea Avenue, a bad part of town,” says attorney Seymour Rosenberg, “this little fat guy and a young guy buzzed my door. I thought maybe they were criminal clients and so I let ’em in and the little fat guy says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ and I laughed and said, ‘No.’ He says, ‘I’m the president of Paramount Records.’ I said, ‘Well great. What are you doing here?’ ‘Nobody’s at Stax Records we can talk to. They said you were their lawyer.’ I had a good laugh over that. Here’s a guy making a quarter of a million a year and he’s gotta come to a six-hundred-dollar-a-month lawyer to find out what’s going on with the company he owns. I don’t think Paramount knew what Stax was doing and Stax didn’t care what Paramount was doing.”
The relationship with Atlantic had been organic—built from shared sensibilities; between Paramount/Gulf & Western and Stax, it was just business. Stax could have been auto parts, pet food, or baby wear. “Atlantic loved the music,” explains William Bell. “I don’t think Gulf & Western understood it, or understood some disc jockey down in Monroe, Louisiana, how to get to him or how to even talk to him.”
“It was big fun until Paramount came along,” says trumpeter Wayne Jackson. “They wanted us to be corporate. They sent people who drifted around the hallways, but they didn’t stay around very long. We weren’t the kind that they wanted to go out to dinner with. And they put up a time machine, ka-toonk, and a card with your name on it. You’d have to ka-toonk when you got there, ka-toonk when you went to lunch. They made us fill out time sheets, what you did each hour. After about a week of that, we started putting in, ‘Eleven A.M., cheeseburger at Slim Jenkins’s Joint. One o’clock went to studio and checked on Booker T. and the MG’s. Nobody there, so back to Slim Jenkins’s Joint.’ We made up this long list of crap that the suits would have to read before they wrote the checks and I know it ate their shorts.”
The suits from New York and Los Angeles might not have understood what was going on in Memphis, but they couldn’t deny its success.
While Stax was piecing itself together, Memphis was furthering its civic segregation. Though fifteen years had passed since the Supreme Court had declared separate but equal schools unsatisfactory and illegal, Memphis and the rest of the nation had done little to act on it. Blacks students made up 54.5 percent of the total Memphis City Schools’ 1969–1970 population, but there were no people of color in positions of authority at the school board. Schools on the largely black south and north sides of Memphis were in disrepair, were afforded only the outdated textbooks recently discarded by white schools, and were saddled with higher student-teacher ratios. The NAACP stepped up its efforts to foment change, demanding more meetings with city officials and demanding representation on the school board. Looking to the success of the sanitation workers in getting their point made, the NAACP began publicly discussing a student boycott. State and federal school funding was based on average daily attendance, and if great numbers of African-Americans began to miss school, it would hit the school board in their pocket.
Meanwhile, as the year since the sanitation strike’s settlement was drawing to a close, so was the memorandum of understanding with the city. Though new discussions had begun in January 1969, no contract was agreed upon by April and, as if to spite the sanitation workers, the city took a unilateral action and passed a fiscal budget that did little to address the wage disagreement. Strike talk was renewed.
T.O. Jones, however, was no longer head of the local. Soon after the strike’s end, the national AFSCME office hired him to help organize in Florida. But once there, he was fired. During his brief time away, his Memphis position had been taken by Jesse Epps, the national representative who’d been in Memphis for several months. The newspaper described Epps as “a short man who walks slightly stooped forward and usually has an examining, pensive look on his face as he pauses between rapid-fire outbursts.” Epps summoned the Public Works employees to Clayborn Temple, scene of the previous year’s meetings. Epps could excite a crowd, and eight hundred sanitation workers cheered him as he shouted, “Strike come July 1!” and “War with Memphis!” He threatened to bring Memphis to a “screeching economic halt” unless union demands were met, including a raise of fifty cents an hour for all employees, which would establish a two-dollar-per-hour minimum (hundreds were making much less). The city was countering with a $1.60 minimum, dismissing the fifty-cent raise as too expensive. The newspaper reported that city council chairman Wyeth Chandler (wh
o would soon be elected mayor) and others “believe that meeting the union demands now would lead to further demands which could not be met.” On the plantation, the phraseology for this thinking was more poetic: Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.
Jesse Epps, left, assumed leadership of the AFSCME union after T.O. Jones. (University of Memphis Libraries/Special Collections)
By late May, when Stax was hosting its soul explosion, Epps led a “spread the misery” campaign in an upscale white shopping center. His followers intended to fill parking lots to prevent commerce; to fill shopping baskets and abandon them; to fill stores and not shop. Several businesses, seeing blacks amassed at the entryway, simply locked their doors and closed early. By mid-June, a strike looming in two weeks, the city announced that garbage trucks would be placed at central locations where citizens could dump their trash. Various other fail-safes were being planned when, with only days left, a settlement was reached. The city agreed to the two-dollar hourly minimum and conceded the direct dues checkoff (paying union dues from Public Works paychecks instead of indirectly through the credit union); the union gave the city a year to implement the raise, and extended the agreement’s term for three years, having long insisted it be only for two. The sanitation workers ratified the agreement with jubilant cheers. While everyone was assembled, the union won an additional dollar per month per member, bringing members’ total checkoff to six dollars per month; the additional dollar was designated for a community-action program in Memphis that Epps said “would work to feed hungry children and to give aid to the poor and those less fortunate than us.”
While the union fought the good fight, Stax fought for its life. Twenty-eight albums—about 280 songs. Working from the autumn of 1968 to the May 1969 soul explosion meant writing, recording, and mixing about one and a half releasable songs every day of the week, weekends included.
The pressure fell heaviest on Booker T. & the MG’s. Though other studios were involved, Stax was still headquarters and they were still top dogs. In addition to playing, they were each producing other artists. Because they had to sleep, and since there was a new second studio inside the McLemore facility, Stax looked for another backing group it could rely on. Ben Cauley and James Alexander, the surviving original Bar-Kays, had sought solace in their music. Soon after the plane crash, they formed a new version of the band. The soul explosion gave them an opportunity to hone their chops.
“Me and James was around each other a whole lot,” says Ben. “We had to go on, but we wanted a new thing.” The group they put together was recognizable yet different. The two original members were in place, and a white cat (Ron Gorden) was on the organ, as before. One noticeable difference was that the group had two drummers, a nod to James Brown’s current band; one was Roy Cunningham, brother to original Bar-Kay Carl Cunningham, and Willie Hall played a second kit.
“Stax was very supportive of us,” says James. “We was trying to operate real fast, to get back to recording right away.” The new group’s first single, “Copy Kat,” was released in October 1968. Another came in March 1969, its title pretty much their motto: “Don’t Stop Dancing (to the Music),” a hard-hitting funk breakdown that evokes King Curtis’s “Memphis Soul Stew.” It also introduces Larry Dodson, who’d joined the Bar-Kays as lead vocalist, adding further dimension to their act. The grooves caught the attention of Isaac Hayes.
Al had approached Isaac about making a solo record for the instant catalog. Isaac had made a jazz piano album at Al’s behest a couple years earlier; this time, Isaac asked if he could record his own way. “Al said, ‘Man, you got carte blanche. Do it however you want to do it,’” remembers Isaac. “I was under no format restrictions and I had total artistic freedom. There were twenty-seven other LPs to carry the load, so I felt no pressure.”
Al had watched Isaac produce records and teach songs to artists, and he sensed a star quality not unlike that of Brook Benton and Billy Eckstine—major stars in their day. He knew Isaac was a flamboyant fashion man. “And that bald head,” says Al. “Bald heads weren’t popular back then, but from a marketing standpoint, we could probably do wonders with this guy—he’s different.” Being different—Al knew that’s how you get records played.
The Bar-Kays had a regular gig and one day Isaac asked—well, told—the new band that he was going to sit in with them, and they should learn “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” A country hit by Glen Campbell the previous year (and more recently redone by Stax’s Mad Lads), “Phoenix” had struck Isaac at first listen. “I thought, God, how this man must have loved this woman,” says Isaac. “I went on the stage, there was a bunch of conversations going in the club, so I told James to hold that first chord and sustain it. ‘Don’t move, don’t change, don’t do anything.’ And I started telling a story about the situation in the song. And the conversations started to subside. Upon the first note of the first verse, I had ’em. And when the song was done, people were crying. I’d touched them. Now, this place, the Tiki Club, was predominantly black. Across town was Club Le Ronde, a predominantly white club. I did the tune there the same way, and the response was the same.”
Bar-Kays drummer Willie Hall, in his late teens, became close with Isaac, who was about a decade older. Willie had finished high school, and when his family moved to Detroit, he’d moved in with his aunt because he didn’t want to break up the Bar-Kays. He remembers Isaac working up the song with the band. “Isaac was one hell of a womanizer,” says Willie. “With so many women, he had some problems. And a lot of the women had their own egos and personalities and problems, and that could spill over onto the rest of the guys. So, a lot of times we would be doing ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ people in the audience would be crying, Isaac would be crying, I’d be crying, the background singers would be crying—because we could relate to the situation.”
Working during the wee hours of the night, Isaac developed four songs. “‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ was eighteen minutes and forty seconds long,” he says. “We cut it live, right there in the studio. I felt what I had to say could not be said in two minutes and thirty seconds. I was all about feeling.” More than half of the song was the spoken, moaning introduction, the story he’d begun telling in nightclubs to attract the audience’s attention. The album was cut at Ardent Studios—Stax was already booked around the clock. Ardent had purchased the same recording console and tape machine that Stax had, and was drawing their overflow. “The terrifying thing was the length of Isaac’s songs,” says Ardent’s owner and chief engineer John Fry. “A reel of tape ran for fifteen minutes, and Isaac’s songs would run longer. We began splicing extra tape onto the reels. Even still, there were takes when I walked into the studio while they were playing and made circles in the air with my finger. They’d improvise an ending.”
Isaac recorded the basic tracks in Memphis and then brought the tapes to Detroit, where arranger Dale Warren (often with Johnny Allen) wrote and recorded string parts. Isaac put his own stamp on another hit, the Bacharach-David song “Walk on By,” which Dionne Warwick took to the top ten in 1964 (his version ran over twelve minutes), and also on “One Woman,” a track recorded the previous year by the then-obscure vocalist Al Green; it was written by two of Memphis’s premier backing vocalists, Charlie Chalmers and Sandra Rhodes. The final song was a collaboration between Isaac and Al Bell with the fanciful title “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic.” Isaac explains, “We just wanted to tease people with all these syllables. The tune actually was talking about a beautiful affair that you had with this woman and you want an encore, a repeat.” The title may be barely pronounceable, but the music is propulsive and grooving. Multilayered, there’s tinkling piano notes on the high end, funky wah-wah guitar in the middle, and drumming on the low end that, just when its rhythm seems clear, defies expectations. Initially a challenge, the song trusts its audience, and sets off for territory not yet explored.
“Isaac was just cool as shit,” says Willie Hall. “He was a great person, en
ergetic, didn’t do any drugs. He’d drink a little Lancers wine. And he would look up in the top of his head, the third eye, trying to come up with an idea—boom, it would come—perfect.”
Deanie Parker’s birthday party, 1968. L–R: Cleotha Staples (rear), Deanie Parker, Pops Staples, Jo Bridges. (Deanie Parker Collection)
“When I finished the album,” Isaac remembers, “I played it for Jack Gibson—Jack the Rapper. He was a former DJ and a new Stax promotions man. And for Joe Medlin, the godfather of all promotions. I dragged them into the conference room and said, ‘I want you all to listen to something.’ When it was over they just sat there. ‘Well?’ I asked. One said, ‘Ike, I never heard anything like it in my life. It’s fantastic. But we don’t know about you getting airplay because it’s so long.’” But Isaac was seeking self-expression—he was leaving airplay to the other albums in the soul explosion.
Al’s vision of a total record company embraced the expanding multimedia world. Nothing was too big. For starters: television. He enlisted WNEW in New York as a partner, creating a one-hour TV concert that beamed from the antenna atop the Empire State Building to all of New York and beyond, and was syndicated in markets including Washington, DC, San Francisco, Memphis, and Los Angeles. “Gettin’ It All Together” featured Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the MG’s, and, in a final effort before parting, Sam and Dave. The set list of classic hits, a tribute to Otis Redding, and a group finale doing Motown were a calculated effort to reach a wide and new audience. “[The TV show] will introduce Stax artists to millions of new people and establish them as visual personalities,” Al proclaimed in the company’s new magazine, Stax Fax, its foray into the print medium. “The New York broadcast in April will also give our first major album release in May a terrific boost, and the subsequent prime-time broadcasts across the country will keep the excitement going.”
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