It was into this febrile atmosphere that a young singer, Linda Lyndell, arrived in Memphis. She may have been one of the most talented and least fortunate singers who ever set foot in the city. Lyndell’s reputation preceded her. Her real name was Linda Rowland and she was born and raised in Gainesville, Florida, where she became a gifted child singer on the southern gospel circuit, often the only white girl in a black choir. By her mid teens she was singing in a garage band, the Rare Breed, a campus band from University of Florida, and a house band in Gainesville’s first strip bar, Dub’s cocktail lounge. Lyndell converted to R&B and toured regularly with some of the most sexually ferocious groups of the era, including southern soul balladeer Gene Middleton, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue and James Brown’s Famous Flames. Memphis mythology has it that she was recommended to Stax by Otis Redding prior to his death, but Lyndell had performed on stage with numerous Stax acts, including the Bar-Kays and Sam and Dave, and had been a preferred pick-up artist when Stax acts toured her native Florida. Lyndell was strikingly good-looking and had a voice that could shift in texture from satin to gravel. In an industry that was still notoriously conservative about soul music, she fulfilled a latent fantasy, that somewhere in America a white girl would emerge who could sing like Aretha and look like Nancy Sinatra. Lyndell offered that possibility. One Stax promotional photograph, taken at midnight, shows her in a sultry pose, wearing a tight satin catsuit and saturated in neon lights. Behind her is a drive-in motel and a 1967 Pontiac GTO. You don’t have to be a master semiotician to read the signs of strident sexuality.
As a young woman Lyndell met a Florida DJ, David ‘The Demon’ Newman, from Jacksonville, who was a cousin of vocalist Jackie Moore and a talented songwriter in the South. It was Newman who recommended her to Stax. Her debut single, written and produced by Newman, was called ‘Bring Your Love Back To Me’, and it was released on Volt Records, coincidentally in the week of Redding’s death. The song stiffed. Then, in 1968 she returned to Memphis for a second studio session, this time recording the stunning ‘What A Man’, a driving R&B classic later recorded by the rap team Salt-N-Pepa. In the week of its release, in part driven by the sexually provocative images of a young white woman working in a black idiom, she started to receive death threats from a Ku Klux Klan branch in northern Florida. The threats came first in poison pen letters and then by sinister phone calls. Posters of her appearances were defaced and Stax received threatening packages stuffed with Klan literature. Understandably traumatised, Lyndell retreated, turning down lucrative bookings and not pushing the song hard enough promotionally. She eventual left the music scene and returned to her native Gainesville to escape the glare of the recording industry.
On 8 April 1968, an estimated 42,000 silently marched through Memphis led by Coretta Scott King, the executives of the SCLC, union leaders and Stax staff members including Isaac Hayes and John Gary Williams of the Mad Lads. It was a sombre funereal occasion but some banners demanded that the intransigent Mayor Loeb settle the strike. Embarrassed by the aftermath of the assassination, Loeb had very slightly shifted ground, and negotiators had reached a deal that allowed the city council to recognise the union and guarantee a better wage. The deal brought the strike to an end, but the union had to threaten another strike several months later, to press the city to follow through with its commitment. The 1968 strike was won, but it had left a sorry legacy that split a divided city even further.
King’s assassination fractured already tense racial relationships in Memphis and put intolerable strain on Stax’s once enlightened policy of studio integration. Many said then, and have since, that the events of 1968 irrevocably changed the atmosphere. Al Bell’s promotion up through the ranks of the company and into the role of shareholder alienated some and angered others. Bell told the writer Robert Gordon that King’s death had strengthened his will to drive an era of black empowerment at the company. ‘What hit me with Dr King’s death was that it was time to start moving with economic empowerment.’ But Bell also admitted that others felt differently, struggling to take anything positive from the times, and that a kind of collective pain settled on Stax. ‘Dr King’s murder changed our lives and our way of living, but at Stax it didn’t change how we interacted with each other,’ he told writer Andria Lisle. ‘It’s difficult to articulate how it affected us, but if I had to narrow it to one word, I would say “pain”. Everybody – Black and White – was sad. Remember, we went to the Lorraine Motel and the Four-Way Grill together, we ate together, swam together, and slept together. Everyone could relate. Then, all of a sudden, the White people working at Stax were concerned about the Black people on the outside who wanted to hurt them because of their skin color.’
It’s a well-worn truism that grief is like a fingerprint, unique and highly personal. Some claim that the pain came with a divisiveness that had not really been visible at Stax before. Isaac Hayes, who had joined many of King’s campaigns and led the Stax delegation at his funeral, pushed for equal employment at Stax. Hayes claims that he told Jim Stewart, ‘This company primarily caters to the R&B market. You’ve got to represent us – you’ve got to have more Blacks in here working in other jobs besides the musicians. I got him to hire a Black secretary, Earlie Byles, and Al Bell got a Black secretary, too.’ But what neither Bell nor Hayes admitted was that their advocacy of greater black ownership and the drive for greater recruitment of black staff left many white people within the company feeling exposed and vulnerable. Producer Steve Cropper and the bassist Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, both Stax loyalists, admitted to feelings of vulnerability and insecurity about how to react to the new mood.
‘I was devastated,’ agent Bettye Berger said. ‘Here we’d built up relationships with people working together, playing together, loving each other, and worshipping together, and I thought it was going to be ruined. I didn’t feel any different, I just felt sorry. I felt guilty, too. I wanted to walk up to everybody and apologize. Right afterwards, I went to some NAACP meetings – Rufus Thomas’s wife sold me a membership. I got some bad vibes there. That bothered me, but it didn’t kill me.’
Jim Stewart tried hard to cling to what made Stax unique. He told a reporter that its specialness was bound up in a mythologised era of racial harmony: ‘Because we’ve learned to live together at Stax Records, we’ve reaped many material benefits. But most of all we’ve acquired peace of mind. When resentments break out all over the nation, we pull our blinds and display a sign that reads: “Look what we’ve done together.”’ It was romantic but true, and it had come perilously close to being snatched from the studios of Memphis.
Most people agree that King’s death bored deep into the minds of the creative staff at Stax. Some writers wanted to bring more anger into their lyrics, others felt more of a sense of loss. Isaac Hayes said at the time: ‘My whole world collapsed; I couldn’t create or do anything. It took me a year to get back in full form.’ Booker T. Jones, among the most introspective of people at Stax, felt the death all but ended their bond with the Lorraine Motel. ‘It wasn’t just that it happened in Memphis,’ he once said. ‘It was an institution for us. And so it couldn’t have been closer had he been shot at 926 McLemore.’ William Bell, who had spent the first part of the sixties in Vietnam and had long harboured the idea of setting up his own label, moved to Atlanta where he founded the critically respected Peachtree Records. ‘I didn’t have the heart to stay in Memphis,’ he said solemnly. ‘Booker T. and I left together. He went to L.A., and I came to Atlanta.’ He felt a sense of personal bereavement that he was escaping the city he had grown up in. Memphis had tested William Bell to the limit, and when he packed his bags he said forlornly that he couldn’t imagine why he would ever come back.
Guy Canipe’s store lasted a few years longer but it, too, closed, a victim of the owner’s age and a fading interest in reconditioned jukeboxes. The doorway lay dormant for many years as Main Street festered, and the only use it served was as a shelter for drunken panhandlers escaping from the winter winds.
It would be decades before it would find a new purpose. Remarkably, it is now the gift store for the National Civil Rights Museum, a centrepiece tourist attraction for those many millions of pilgrims who want still to witness the place where King died.
In the courtyard of the Sorbonne in Paris, 30 May 1968, where students and teachers have been in occupation since 13 May.
© Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images
BOOKER T. JONES AND THE PARIS RIOTS
30 May
It was by a series of bizarre coincidences that Maoist revolutionary students came to influence the life of Booker T. Jones. When the phone rang at the Stax offices, no one had ever heard of Jules Dassin, but the phone call triggered an assignment that would take Jones to the heart of Europe, into a cauldron of intense political upheaval, and lure Stax into the high-wire world of commercial cinema. Nothing Jones had witnessed in his young life in Memphis – even the riots in the aftermath of King’s killing – came close to matching what he was about to see in Paris.
Booker T. Jones was the closest Stax music had to a prodigy: the son of a high-school science teacher, through his protected childhood he mastered a wide range of instruments before embarking aged fourteen on the life of a professional musician, working in nightclub bands and sitting in on Stax sessions that at times were strictly adult-only. Like Little Stevie Wonder at Motown in Detroit, Jones was a precociously gifted kid who could take his place alongside the most seasoned of professionals. His mother worried about the cynical and hard-bitten environments he sometimes worked in but encouraged him to be the best. It was a remarkable achievement in child-rearing; Jones became one of the precious few child stars who survived the journey with his ego and emotions intact. The CBS publicist and jazz aficionado Bob Altshuler wrote fulsomely of the young Jones on the sleeve notes of the 1962 album Green Onions: ‘[His] musical talents became apparent at a very early age. By the time he entered high school, Booker was already a semi-professional, and quickly recognised as the most talented musician in his school. He was appointed director of the school band for four years, and in addition, organised the school dance orchestra which played for proms throughout the Mid South. In the classroom, he concentrated on the studies of music theory and harmony . . . Booker’s multiple activities earned him a coveted honour, that of being listed in the students’ Who’s Who of American High Schools.’
Booker T. Jones Jr, blessed with a name inherited from his father and from the great Negro educator, came to the attention of Stax’s Jim Stewart while still at Booker T. Washington High School, a place that he joked had in part been named after him. He took occasional work as a studio musician, appearing as backing instrumentalist on many sessions, hauling around a huge variety of instruments with him, knowing he could do a decent or a spectacular job, depending on what was required on the night. Jones was only in tenth grade when he first stepped into the studios of what was then Satellite Records in South Memphis. He had been hired on a one-day cash-in-hand contract to play the baritone saxophone on ‘Cause I Love You’, a song written by Rufus Thomas and his daughter Carla. But the big break came in the early months of 1962, when Jones adapted a traditional twelve-bar Memphis blues and disrupted it with his nagging organ sound, to co-create ‘Green Onions’, one of the most famous instrumentals ever recorded. Although his parents had sparked his obsession with music, buying, salvaging or borrowing instruments to widen his range, it was always conditional on completing his education, and, unlike almost every other rising star in the cut-throat world of R&B, he followed the path of Carla Thomas – who attended Howard University in Washington at the height of her success – and interrupted the very real prospects of global fame to complete a degree at Indiana University. To maintain momentum, he returned to Memphis at weekends to record at Stax, where he was a featured instrumentalist behind the major recording artists of the time, including Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. According to all his extant educational reports, Jones thrived at Indiana University and managed to balance two distinctly different lives: he joined the university’s symphony orchestra as a trombonist and rehearsed amidst the gothic beauty of the Bloomington campus, and then shuttled back to Memphis to play organ in the Stax studios among the boarded buildings and decaying stores of McLemore Avenue. On his graduation, Jones had numerous offers to play with professional orchestras, but he defied his tutors, turning down the grand halls of classical music in favour of the grittier world of R&B, and rejoining his own group, the M.G.’s. Although he played almost every instrument in the orchestral range, it was the Hammond B-3 organ with which Jones became synonymous. Journalist Marc Myers claims that it was Booker T. who ‘transformed the Hammond B-3 organ from a gospel instrument featured primarily behind jazz and blues saxophonists to a rock-soul keyboard that influenced several generations of rock and soul musicians’. The Hammond was a ghetto centrepiece, made famous first in churches, then gospel concerts, but it then betrayed the Good Lord and moved into R&B nightclubs and featured on scratchy jazz releases, most famously by Jimmy Smith and Brother Jack McDuff. For years, the instrument was associated with cheapness and availability, and sold in low-budget stores and pawnshops on Beale Street. The organist John Medeski once described the Hammond organ as ‘the poor man’s big band’. But for all its associations with the ghettos of the early sixties, Jones and his cultured control of his keyboard transformed its image yet again, and with Stax’s increasing reach his relentless hard-edged organ attack came to define a subgenre of soul music which Geoffrey Stokes in his book Rock of Ages described as pure Memphis – ‘spiritually . . . midway between New Orleans and Detroit’. It was a sound that would infect clubs across the world, driven by youth culture, the Modernists and amphetamine soul.
Stax session musician Sandy Kay, who came to the company at a time when the Detroit vocalist Darrell Banks was recording an album, was in awe of Jones. In his diary he described watching every small gesture he made. ‘One of the things I remember is how much I wanted to get to know Booker. I wanted to play music with him, I wanted him to teach me to play better. But it was difficult because he was around so infrequently. That was a disappointment to me. Several times, I’d sit quietly in his office, watching him at his desk writing string charts – directly from his head to the paper, not even referring to the piano to try out the lines or harmonies. That totally amazed me. Booker was, and still is today, a rare combination of a schooled, educated musician, and also a “feel” player that can get down into a groove effortlessly. If this sounds like a case of hero worship, maybe that’s because it is.’
It was the juddering and edgy urban sound pioneered by Booker T. Jones that Jules Dassin wanted to capture for Uptight, destined to become one of the most controversial and seminal films of its time. Dassin had long harboured a desire to remake and modernise John Ford’s classic film The Informer (1935). A Paramount executive, nervous about a remake of a political film, supposedly said, ‘I’m crazy, but we’ll do it,’ and allocated a budget of two million dollars. The events of 1968 heightened Dassin’s passion and sharpened his focus, and he began to imagine a remake of the film with a black cast, shifting the theme of betrayal away from the original context of Irish republicanism to the politics of Black Power and insurgent groups like the Black Panthers and the Memphis Invaders. Not fully aware of this radical shift of thought, the funders at Paramount continued to reluctantly support the film. It was never a priority for the company and fell off the studio’s radar. Using his Paris apartment and working surreptitiously from a rented home on Fifth Avenue in New York, which his new wife Melina Mercouri had rented during her stint on Broadway, Dassin immersed himself in black politics, culture and music. He was keen to cast the young black actor Ossie Davis in a leading role, but he was tied to a tight filming schedule in Mexico and recommended his wife, the emergent black actress Ruby Dee. She ultimately starred in the film but, more importantly, became the authentic voice in the scripting process. Dassin wanted a film that would burn with the passion of the ghetto. D
ee convinced him not to set the film in a fictional Harlem or a grieving Memphis, but in her home town of Cleveland, Ohio, in a notorious neighbourhood called Hough. Her logic was simple. Hough had been the site of destructive riots in the summer of 1966 but was rarely the backdrop to feature films. Hough was also home to one of the great desegregated nightclubs of the era, Leo’s Casino, where the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, John Coltrane, Ray Charles and the Temptations had headlined. The club had nearly been engulfed by the riots, and as Dee recounted the story to Dassin, he became obsessed with finding a soundtrack to the film. Dee and Dassin played music incessantly throughout the scripting sessions, and although they had no specific plans to recruit Booker T. and the M.G.’s, they agreed that it was worth commissioning Stax to provide musicians who could oversee the soundtrack. When the request first came to the McLemore studios it was directed to Al Bell’s office, who in turn recommended Jones, sensing that his multi-instrumental skills were best suited to shaping a soundtrack. Although Jones had worked in almost every conceivable area of contemporary black music he had never scored a film. Through Stax’s new connections in Hollywood, Jones flew there briefly to meet the urbane master of musical soundtracks, Quincy Jones, who taught him about sequencing, layering and playback techniques. After an intense round of tutorials Booker T. and the M.G.’s then flew on to Paris for an initial period of post-production.
Memphis 68 Page 18
