On the Sunday after the deaths, 800 black workers packed into the Memphis Labor Temple on South Second Street. Righteous fury gripped the hall. With neither a vote nor a plan of action, the emotional energy tipped towards strike action, at a time when striking against public services was illegal. The next morning, a clear majority of the city’s sanitation workers failed to show up for work, and Mayor Loeb began the hurried and contentious job of recruiting agency labour and scab workers. A protest march was called, one of the many that would divide Memphis in the months ahead. Eight hundred workers gathered at the Firestone plant – a vast smoke-stacked industrial sprawl that scarred the North Memphis skyline while pumping out 20,000 car tyres a day – and then marched downtown to the new city hall on Main Street. It was a march about pay and conditions, civil rights and, in a more subtle sense, a march against anonymity. Maxine Smith, the executive secretary of the Memphis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), said starkly, ‘I’ve lived in this city all my life and I’ve never seen a white garbage worker.’
The strike received an early boost when Radio Station WDIA, the voice of black Memphis, held a minute’s silence on air for the dead workers. On the surface it was an act of respect for the dead, but it was interpreted as tacit support for the strike, silently sending a message out to a community who saw the radio station as an informal leader. WDIA had dominated the airwaves in black homes since the early fifties. It had stumbled on air in 1947 but grew in self-confidence with the emergence of Memphis blues. B.B. King and Dwight ‘Gatemouth’ Moore were among its most popular entertainers, and then Rufus Thomas, the minstrel turned soul singer, connected the station to Stewart and Axton and the early days of Stax Records. WDIA attracted listeners and talent from across the Mid South, and it became the place-on-the-dial that people tuned to in order to hear the new faces of black music: Jimmy Reed, Little Walter, Big Joe Williams, the Platters, Muddy Waters and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland. In 1956, at the height of his first wave of fame, Elvis Presley showed up at WDIA’s annual revue, the most influential talent competition in the city. He clowned about backstage with Rufus Thomas and posed for the ‘Two Kings’ snapshot with B.B. King – a now iconic image taken by local photographer Ernest Withers. Presley is dressed in a dapper striped jacket, his arm casually wrapped around the shoulders of B.B. King, who is dressed in a plaid band suit. That lingering and friendly arm screamed of significance in a city that Martin Luther King described as a place ‘still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation’. Elvis was the most famous white singer on the planet, and to see an image of him acknowledging a debt to black Memphis underlined the awesome power of rhythm and blues. WDIA was building up to a triumphant year. Lou Rawls, the Fifth Dimension, Jackie Wilson, and Peaches and Herb were all due to appear on Dwight ‘Gatemouth’ Moore specials in the weeks to come and the station’s flagship talent show, Starlite Revue 1968, was to be held in June at the Mid-South Coliseum. It would feature Joe Tex, Percy Sledge, the Intruders and local acts. The Bar-Kays, Rufus Thomas and, most current of all, the Box Tops – whose hit song ‘The Letter’, produced by Dan Penn, was a stand-out hit in an era crowded with soulful white garage bands – were also scheduled to appear.
The sounds of Memphis jammed the airwaves across America, but apart from a minute of commemorative silence on a local radio station, Echol Cole and Robert Walker were anonymous and dead. Nor was their anonymity all to do with their lowly station in life. By one of the many curious twists of fate that were to visit Memphis in the years ahead, the death of the two sanitation workers had directly coincided with the birth of Elvis Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie. The pack of press photographers and local journalists who might have given greater coverage to the deaths largely ignored the events unfolding at John Gaston Hospital and were instead crowded by the doorways of the ten-storey Baptist Memorial Hospital waiting for news of Memphis’s most famous musical family, the Presleys. The coverage of the birth dominated front pages and entertainment columns across the USA and came with the breathless reportage of the celebrity press. The baby weighed six pounds fifteen ounces and, as the mother was pushed in a wheelchair to the parking lot, her beauty was unconfined. ‘Mrs. Presley, dressed in a pink dress and with long, flowing hairdo, was pretty pleased with her daughter.’ ‘She’s perfect, she couldn’t be any better,’ Priscilla Presley told a reporter.
The Sanitation Workers Strike had to create its own visibility. The bold and dramatic I AM A MAN posters that the strikers adopted while picketing made even the most thinly attended demonstration seem bold and assertive. Rather than huddling together, the strikers walked in single file, a half-block apart: planned, dignified and unbowed. Many of the bigger strike meetings attracted performers from the gospel and soul fraternities, either singing songs from the civil rights catalogue or warming up the audience for speeches that were often inspired rhetoric rather than a mundane restatement of the workers’ key demands. On 5 March, Memphis City Council’s weekly meeting broke conclusively with the norm. Rather than speaking to a half empty room of barely engaged councillors, the hall was packed with strike supporters. Like many civil rights protests in the years gone by, charismatic ministers were at the forefront of the protest movement. The Reverend Ezekiel Bell, pastor of Parkway Gardens Presbyterian Church – ‘a man of small stature but a giant among us’ according to fellow civil rights leader Dwight Montgomery – had already challenged the council with an impassioned address at a previous meeting. ‘This is a racist country,’ he declaimed. ‘You call our sons off to be killed to protect your way of life. It takes about $350,000 to kill a Vietnam soldier. They came back here and don’t have a place to live.’ Bell then went on to argue that the city should accept a ‘dues check-off’, the right of the union to recruit members and collect their dues at source.
Irritated council members began to drift away when a protestor, NAACP leader Maxine Smith, who in her teenage years had been refused entry to the then all-white Memphis State University, shouted, ‘Don’t leave me here by myself!’ and launched into a powerful gospel rendition of ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’. Smith’s voice rang with authority. She had been a leading force in the battle to desegregate the school system in Memphis and had acted as the ‘surrogate mother’ when she led the first thirteen black children into a whites-only school. As Smith sang, raising her voice as if on stage, others joined in. They continued to belt out songs from the civil rights songbook, and what had begun as a protest meeting gradually became a sit-in. Police were called to clear the council chamber, but their efforts fell on stony ground and they were faced down by a determined audience who had no intention of moving. They awaited arrest one by one. One hundred and seventeen people, some tied to the chamber banisters with belts and shoelaces, were eventually hauled from the chamber and taken to jail. They appeared the following morning at the Chancery Court in what was the biggest day of arrests in the history of the Memphis police. Thirteen ministers were among the convicted. Maxine Smith was jailed for supposedly having led the revolt and her colleague the Reverend Rosalyn Nichols later said of her: ‘Maxine took hell into her heart, went to jail, paid the price, took the stand, gave her all, so you and I could sit and stand, go and play and dream. She took which was impure and gave us back hope, faith and love.’
As the fury of the sanitation workers grew, the strike attracted the attention of the nation’s most famous civil rights activist, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, whose commitment to support the strike set the context for momentous events ahead. The historian Taylor Branch wrote: ‘Echol Cole and Robert Walker soon became the anonymous cause that diverted Martin Luther King to Memphis for his last march. City flags flew at half-mast for them, but they never were public figures . . . Cole and Walker would not be listed among civil rights martyrs, nor studied like Rosa Parks as the catalyst for a new movement.’ They died anonymously, known not for their dignity and toil but for the horrendous filth they worked in and the gruesome circumstances of their death.
This was not a joyous moment in the resistance of civil rights movement but poverty and exploitation at its very worst. Slavery was long gone but its legacy lived on.
Wilson Pickett: wicked to the core.
© Granamour Weems Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
WILSON PICKETT’S FEROCIOUS TEMPER
23 February
‘Who would ever have thought that a butcher boy from Youngstown, Ohio, would end up with twenty-four million smackers in his pocket?’ With these self-aggrandising words, the movie mogul Jack L. Warner, one-time owner of Warner Brothers, turned his back on Hollywood. What no one knew at the time was that his characteristically mouthy departure would trigger a series of events that would reverberate around the music scene and, by 1968, strike a body blow to the very survival of Stax Records.
Back in September 1965, Jack Warner had sold 1.6 million shares in the world-famous studio to an ambitious equity investment company called Seven Arts Inc., who at the time were stalking the entertainment industry, looking to diversify away from movie production. They had a fanciful management plan to dominate the so-called seven arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, dance, theatre/cinema, along with the modern additions of photography and comics. It smacked of corporate narcissism based on a surprisingly thin portfolio of proven success. The company’s greatest success to date was a part-share in the Hammer horror movie The Plague of the Zombies, and a back-share in the 1961 film The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe. At the time of the acquisition, Warner Brothers had built a small soul music subsidiary called Loma Records, aimed principally at the singles market in urban areas. The roster of artists included Ben Aiken, Carl Hall, Linda Jones and the Apollas – talented artists but hardly household names. Never likely to break big, let alone reach the fantastical levels of profitability promised in the Seven Arts management strategy, the hunt was now on for a bigger scalp, a company with proven success in music. Within a matter of months, the conglomerate made an audacious bid for Atlantic Records in New York, the self-proclaimed West Point of rhythm and blues. Suddenly, through acquisition, the Warner Bros.–Seven Arts group could claim leverage over the careers of many of soul music’s most inspirational voices – Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Don Covay, Solomon King, Ben E. King, Carla Thomas, Sam and Dave – and the highly exploitable back catalogue of the late Otis Redding. Only the effervescent stars of Detroit’s Motown Corporation were out of their avaricious reach.
Ominously for Stax Records, and for Memphis, the game that they thought they knew had changed for ever. A spate of mergers and acquisitions had gripped every sector of the US corporate landscape, threatening the wellbeing of small independent record labels and making scale all but essential. Everything that had once seemed settled was suddenly up for grabs. The very idea of regionality – making music in a small southern city – came under strain and a Stax–Atlantic national distribution deal that had been signed in 1965, and had existed before that as a gentleman’s agreement, finally and dramatically unravelled.
In the spring of 1968 Stax stared mortality in the face. Relationships with their one-time big brother Atlantic came under strain and then finally broke down, never to be repaired. Stax tried to negotiate a solution but came up against a new generation of faceless management who knew nothing of Memphis music and everything about contract law. Jim Stewart, his sister Estelle and their passionate publicity manager Al Bell flew to New York to try to argue their case but were coldly rebuffed. Buried within the small print of old contracts was a requirement that all of Stax’s master tapes were the property of Atlantic Records, and so they now came under the ownership of the decidedly less chummy conglomerate. Nor was their ownership in any way settled, either. Having splashed out on Atlantic, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts faced serious cash flow problems, which in turn weakened their market position and made them vulnerable to takeover. Even higher up the corporate food chain, the giant Kinney National, a parking-lot company that faced accusations of price fixing across America, had become aware of Warner’s weakness and pounced. It was an unholy mess of confused ownership, anti-trust suits and complicated legal disputes that only full-blown American corporate capitalism could have scripted.
Suddenly, Stax’s existence, its status, and most of all its creative history, was torn from its control. The best records and the cream of Memphis music – Booker T. and the M.G.’s, Rufus Thomas, Otis Redding, the Mad Lads, Eddie Floyd, Arthur Conley, Johnnie Taylor and William Bell – were gone, drowned in the small print and sucked into a legal minefield.
For over two months, until they rediscovered the will to fight back, Stax were thrown into disarray. Cursing their friendship with Jerry Wexler, the one-time sage who had brought them into the Atlantic fold, they had come to realise that they had been the victims of emollient duping and had simply become a service company providing studio production duties for Atlantic in return for distribution. The initial friendship was forged back in 1960, when Stax were touting a local R&B record by father-and-daughter act Rufus and Carla Thomas around southern radio stations. A distributor mentioned the local buzz on a raucous record called ‘Cause I Love You’ to Wexler, who, as a writer with the industry magazine Billboard, had coined the phrase ‘rhythm and blues’. Although he left full-time writing, Wexler never lost his loquaciousness, and throughout his formidable career he remained an articulate and witty man. On leaving journalism, he set up Atlantic Records with the sons of the Turkish ambassador to the USA, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, and, after a stuttering start, Atlantic became home to a generation of African-American stars including Ray Charles, Lavern Baker, Clyde McPhatter & the Drifters, Sam and Dave, and Wilson Pickett.
Jerry Wexler described himself in his autobiography as a ‘Bronx window-cleaner-turned-R&B-maestro’. He grew up in Washington Heights, an area of New York nicknamed ‘Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson’ where an influx of Jews from Germany and Austria had settled after their escape from fascism in Europe. Prone to clever turns of phrase and always putting himself in the centre of the action, Wexler once christened the emotionally troubled Aretha Franklin as ‘Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows’. His wordplay was the equal of his exquisite taste in music, and as the Atlantic roster of artists grew in size and reputation, Wexler became enthralled by the funk-soul sounds coming like a midnight train from the southern recording studios, first working with Stax until their fall-out, and then American Sound Studio in Memphis and finally moving on again to Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
When Wexler first met Jim Stewart it was in every respect a meeting of opposites: Wexler was a self-confident and at times showy extrovert; Jim Stewart took pills for high blood pressure and was painfully introverted. Wexler was a fan of sophisticated jazz; Stewart a child of rural hillbilly. Although the Civil War was ancient history, Wexler was a product of the urbane north while Stewart was steeped in the ways of Dixie and the Deep South. For a time – rich in output – their differences worked and their culture clash produced some of the greatest soul music ever. Over a period of three years, Wexler sent Atlantic’s best singers south to Memphis. It proved to be a creative period rich in quality but high in emotional anxiety. Wexler had not only dispatched his best singers, he had dumped a flammable cargo of personalities on Memphis, singers with deeply complex and volatile personalities, who constantly teetered on the edge of eruption.
By February 1968, relations between north and south had soured. The long history of co-operation had turned into resentment, and a myth had settled in the minds of the studio staff on East McLemore. They had come to believe that Wexler – once seen as a visionary – was deliberately dumping soul music’s most cantankerous talent on the studio. It was a misreading of Wexler’s motives, but for several stressful years in the mid sixties, Atlantic sent Stax the ‘Wicked’ Wilson Pickett, a gun-toting vocalist whom Wexler himself found troublesome. He described Pickett with two unflattering words – ‘the pistol’ – that hinted at his lawless, violent and sexual temperament. Atlantic also
sent Stax Don ‘Pretty Boy’ Covay, a former chauffeur for Little Richard and a turbulent singer-songwriter, who had an inferiority complex that nearly wrecked his career. Covay had trawled the studios of New York with patchy success and bore a grudge that his talent was not sufficiently recognised. Then, to add gasoline to the flames, Wexler talked Stax into recording the most combustible duo ever to record soul music, the warring and dysfunctional Sam and Dave. Isaac Hayes, a man who was familiar with demanding Memphis musicians and had witnessed bad behaviour close-up in his years working in bar-room soul groups across Memphis, described the visiting Atlantic talent as ‘a fucking war zone’. Inflammatory disagreements, appalling personal behaviour and violent fistfights were common, but out of the highly charged studio environment greatness was born.
Memphis 68 Page 6
