With Memphis shell-shocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King and the city still on high alert, Jones boarded the plane for Paris believing he was leaving social turmoil far behind. He imagined a Paris of high culture and had even planned to visit some of the city’s great symphony halls. He was genuinely taken aback that his plans were thrown into disarray. Paris, a city used to political upheaval, had become engulfed by well-organised cadres of Maoist-inspired students and hardened strikers, who had taken to the streets and were on the brink of winning control of the city in a rebellious time now known simply as May ’68.
On his first few nights in Paris, Jones stayed with Dassin and his wife. Looking out the windows at the troubled arrondissement below, Jones watched the Paris uprisings close up, as students built barricades, fought with riot police and led mass demonstrations through the streets. According to an anonymous student’s eyewitness account of the first days of the Paris uprisings, ‘the rue Gay-Lussac still carries the scars of the “night of the barricades”. Burnt-out cars line the pavement, their carcasses a dirty grey under the missing paint. The cobbles, cleared from the middle of the road, lie in huge mounds on either side. A vague smell of tear gas still lingers in the air. At the junction with the rue des Ursulines lies a building site, its wire mesh fence breached in several places. From here came material for at least a dozen barricades: planks, wheelbarrows, metal drums, steel girders, cement mixers, blocks of stone. The site also yielded a pneumatic drill. The students couldn’t use it, of course – not until a passing building worker showed them how, perhaps the first worker actively to support the student revolt. Once broken, the road surface provided cobbles, soon put to a variety of uses.’
As Paris burned, Jones soon learned that Dassin and his wife were committed political activists and fully in support of the striking workers and enraged students. Melina Mercouri was a fervent opponent of the Greek military junta and became the international face of Greek resistance in exile. As a consequence of her public stance, she was stripped of her citizenship and her property in Greece was seized. But her determination and the influence she had on Dassin was electrifying. As they navigated their way through barricades to the editing suite Jones was given a running commentary of the events and the many factions that had taken to the streets. It was in marked contrast to his first European visit when he had been a featured act on the famous Stax/Volt European tour of 1967, appearing at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, supporting Otis Redding. For very different reasons, Dassin and Mercouri were living in forced exile in Paris, and were passionate that the film they wanted to make would become the first feature film to reflect the waves of anger that were surging through America’s inner-city ghettos. They told Jones they wanted a soundtrack of the streets, the Stax sound, but infused with urgency, anger and the hope of change. It was the beginning of a project that would remain controversial for decades yet to come, before its true creative ambitions burned out.
Jules Dassin was a Jewish New Yorker who had been an actor in ARTEF, the militant Yiddish theatre company that emerged against the backdrop of the Depression of the thirties and was one of the great forces of progressive ideas in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He moved into cinema, first directing short films and then becoming one of the pioneers of film noir such as The Naked City (1948) – ‘a painstaking procedural thriller whose principal character, filmed wholly on location, was New York City itself’ – and Thieves’ Highway (1949), an intense modern thriller set unusually in the rural farmlands of central California. Dassin’s career was seriously derailed in the paranoid fifties when he was identified as a communist by the now notorious McCarthy witch hunts and blacklisted from working in the film industry. He relocated first to London and then to Paris, defying the American ban, and after a lengthy hiatus directed the multi-award-winning film Rififi (1955), remarkable for its lengthy and much copied opening heist sequence, where not a word is spoken. In Paris Dassin met and married Melina Mercouri, who had recently been exiled from her native Greece. At the height of the coup d’état there, Mercouri had been performing on stage on Broadway and immediately began a spirited vocal campaign to reinstall democracy in Greece. Nightly throughout 1968, she raged against the generals and received standing ovations from crowds who barely knew there was a military junta in her homeland. It was Mercouri who pressurised Dassin into challenging his status as a banned filmmaker in America, and through a series of intermediaries he managed to convince Paramount to develop and seed-fund his remake of John Ford’s The Informer. The story of betrayal, in which an Irish rebel acts as an informer and sells out a close friend in order to gain passage to America, obsessed Dassin. He, too, had been betrayed – to McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1948 – by the tragic Edward Dmytryk, who, facing exile and impoverishment, eventually named those in the film industry, including Dassin, he knew to be members of the Communist Party.
Responding intuitively to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Dassin headed to Atlanta and filmed part of the official funeral cortège and then travelled on to Memphis and Cleveland, where he filmed the aftermath of rioting and the burnt-out ghetto buildings. As he travelled from city to city, like a guerrilla film-maker, he gathered raw documentary footage that would add edge and authenticity to the finished film. In one scene a group of radicals are watching television coverage of King’s funeral and the script picks up from the solemn images. ‘The man from love got his head shot off,’ says the character Jeannie, played by Janet MacLachlan. ‘And all those people learned nothing,’ says the organisation’s co-leader B.G., played as an austere Afrocentric militant by a rising star of black cinema, Raymond St Jacques. ‘Death is a fast teacher. They’ll learn, it’s clearer now.’
Uptight opened to mixed reviews. Most critics could see its intent to create a breakthrough film that was dramatically honest about ghetto politics and the insurrectionary Black Power activists, but there was criticism for some of the acting, mostly focusing on the melodramatic and odd performance by the emotionally tortured informer, a character called Tank played by Julian Mayfield. Like Dassin, Mayfield was a leftist intellectual who was at the time under FBI surveillance suspected of communist agitation. Mayfield’s performance was a frustrating flaw in the film that Dassin himself recognised. He had tried to secure the services of the talented young actor James Earl Jones as Tank, but he was unavailable and the compromise of casting a friend always irked Dassin.
The phlegmatic Roger Ebert was one of several prominent critics who saw real value in the film, but in his regular column in the Chicago Sun-Times he questioned the motives of its backers, stating that ‘it’s remarkable that a major studio financed and released this film’. What he did not know was that Paramount did everything in its power to dump the movie. Scared off by its themes and its frankness, they got cold feet and refused to order up enough prints. The cinemas that were keen to show it struggled to get access to the film and many more movie chains, intimidated by its content, simply ignored it. The publicity budget was risible. Interest from European territories, especially France and Germany, failed to convince Paramount that it was worth backing. Whatever their real motivations, the studio’s reluctance to get behind the film has since been interpreted as censorship by default. Ruby Dee, the co-writer and producer, remains convinced that Paramount tried to pull the film from distribution and washed their hands of its controversial ideas. Nonetheless, with each passing year, the reputation of the film grew and mutated, and by the nineties, all but impossible to track down, Uptight took on a cult status and its underground reputation soared.
For all its invisibility in the past, Uptight became a ‘forgotten classic’, the forerunner of the black urban thriller, the genre of films that subsequently became known as blaxploitation movies. As for the soundtrack, it survived independently. Jones for his part was unimpressed by the basic sound facilities in Paris. After completing the film track he returned to Memphis and re-recorded the music at the Stax studios. Mo
st of the tracks were composed to fit the urgent pace of the movie and were mostly instrumentals, but periodically Jones called on the services of the gospel-trained vocalist Judy Clay to front some of the tracks. Clay had recently enjoyed widespread success with ‘Private Number’, a duet with William Bell, and Stax were keen to find her opportunities as a solo singer. Jones himself sang on one track, but the biggest success from the entire Uptight project was the film’s relentless refrain, a Hammond-led instrumental that became known as ‘Time Is Tight’. On commercial release in early 1969 it reached number six in the Billboard Top 100 pop charts and became Booker T. and the M.G.’s biggest hit since ‘Green Onions’.
Curiously, as Booker T. Jones worked on the soundtrack in an editing suite in troubled Paris, another character soon to sign to Stax was working only a few streets away. After travelling the world, the black bohemian Melvin Van Peebles had temporarily settled in Paris, where he was producing plays, directing short films and recording obscure music. Within a matter of eighteen months, on the back of a lucky break with one of his French shorts, he would embark on the next great chapter in African-American cinema, the self-funded and innovative Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Born in Chicago, Melvin Peebles was a beatnik with a restlessly creative streak who had studied literature in Chicago and read street poetry in Amsterdam. He adopted the Dutch name ‘Van’ and became known thereafter as Melvin Van Peebles. He had travelled extensively, married and then divorced a German photographer, Maria Marx, and worked for a spell on the San Francisco cable cars. He affected a revolutionary pose, wore berets and utilitarian work wear buttoned up like Chairman Mao, and smoked gigantic cigars in the style of Fidel Castro. He was invited to Paris by Henri Langlois, the eccentric founder of La Cinémathèque Français, who introduced him to the French auteurs of the day such as Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. With the shambling but well-connected Langlois as his mentor, Van Peebles started to produce low-budget shorts in Paris and then embarked on his first feature film, La Permission, or as it became known in the USA The Story of a Three-Day Pass, a film based on his own novel and derivative of the French new wave in that it was shot entirely in black and white. Coincidentally, Van Peebles used many French freelance film technicians who then went on to work with Dassin on the post-production of Uptight. With a French feature to his credit and a coterie of France’s best known directors singing his praises, Van Peebles managed to secure a US release for the film in the spring of 1968, and subsequently bagged a three-picture deal with Columbia Pictures. According to his own version of events, Van Peebles then converted the retainer from Columbia into the seed-funding for another project, the seminal Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. With limited funding he improvised a shooting schedule, making up scenes as they moved from location to location. Van Peebles hired a crew who would work cheaply and yet were confident with sound and cameras, a crew unburdened by the studio system or union practices. He turned to the porn industry for his technicians and made up the script as he went, shooting the entire film over an intense nineteen days. He post-produced with a loan from Bill Cosby and dubbed a self-composed soundtrack, in part performed by a then unknown and homeless Earth, Wind and Fire. Melvin and his son Mario both star in the film, which features a set-piece scene in which Van Peebles and a young Black Panther beat up an LA cop with his own handcuffs after a false arrest. The scene was endorsed by the Panthers, whose notoriety brought it even greater publicity. So, too, did its restless editing style, which was punctuated with radical jump-cuts and montage sequences. Closer to an underground art film than studio blockbuster, it opened in only two cinemas, but word of mouth carried it much further, and the original no-budget film grossed over $4.1 million, making it the most profitable film of its era. Suddenly, black films had become financially viable and the race was on to bring even more to the screens. Stax picked up the musical rights to the film and released ‘Sweetback’s Theme’ as a single, but it was the album that breathed life into future music by becoming a seminal source for the first generation of hip-hop artists.
Meanwhile, a routine meeting in New York in the summer of 1968 kick-started the third and most triumphant of Stax’s trilogy of blaxploitation films: the daddy of the genre, Shaft. At the time, a Cleveland-born journalist Ernest Tidyman was completing a pulp novel called Flower Power, a racy book about the latest youth cult, the hippies. At an editorial meeting with his publisher Alan Rinzler, then the editor of Macmillan’s mystery department, a better idea surfaced. Rinzler was relatively new to the industry and unrestrained by its conventions. A Harvard graduate, who by his own admission was ‘living on the Lower East Side, writing terrible plays and loading trucks as a fur freight despatcher in the garment business’ only a year before, he was determined to make a success of commercial literature. It was a meeting fizzing with ideas but dominated by a major literary controversy, the publication of William Styron’s slave novel The Confessions of Nat Hunter, which, despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1967, was roundly attacked by black intellectuals for perpetuating myths about black rapists and victimhood. Tidyman and his publisher discussed the whole notion of the poor victim and became excited about turning the concept on its head by creating a character bulging with ability, who could become a black literary hero. Together they began to imagine a smooth and athletic Harlem detective whose name became John Shaft. Tidyman made it a priority and quickly knocked off a detective thriller called Shaft. Predictably, on the back of Melvin Van Peebles’ commercial success with the first breakthrough black movie, the film studios had abandoned their normal anxieties and were hunting high and low for an unpredictable commercial film that could appeal to what they described as a new ‘urban’ market. A detective novel with pace and a clear plotline suited all their needs, and the novel Shaft was bought up by MGM, with Tidyman writing the screenplay.
Initially, Isaac Hayes, by then a successful recording artist off the back of two important and commercially successful albums – Hot Buttered Soul (1969) and Black Moses (1971) – harboured the thought of moving into acting and offered himself up to director Gordon Parks Jr for the title role of John Shaft. Hayes had been working with the Detroit producer Don Davis on the origins of what became Hot Buttered Soul in the last days of 1968. It was a disruptive album which has since become a landmark in the evolution of soul. Four tracks, each substantially longer than the traditional three-minute pop song, used strings in a way that paralleled the movie soundtrack, but then brought in urban synthesisers in ways that foretold the chase sequences in Shaft. The opening track is a drug-laced version of ‘Walk On By’, not in the classic style of Dionne Warwick’s love song but as if it was scored by Curtis Mayfield and a streetful of junkies, and then boldly followed by a borderline unpronounceable track that used the Sanitation Workers Strike as the basis for a modern love song: ‘Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic’. ‘We absolutely changed the landscape of popular music with those albums,’ Al Bell said. ‘We helped make it possible for artists like Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson to achieve the kind of greatness that they reached.’
After the critical acclaim of Hot Buttered Soul Hayes assumed the persona of ‘Black Moses’ and, using the challenging language of post-slavery, described a kind of musical emancipation that arose from a period of depression and extended mourning after King’s assassination. He described this reawakening as something akin to self-discovery: ‘I’m not chained any more. It’s a new freedom. I’m free.’ In another exchange he touched on the one area of self-realisation that set him apart. Despite endless approaches, Hayes was always reluctant to endorse mainstream politicians, preferring to focus on what he called ‘the misery of the ghetto’ and the unfinished business on the streets of Memphis. Of all the superstars who emerged from Stax it was Isaac Hayes and, of course, John Gary Williams of the Mad Lads who came closest to reflecting the distressed communities of Memphis in song. The global success of Shaft took Hayes into a stratospheric level of fame
that no one at Stax – not even Otis Redding – had witnessed before. On the night of his Oscar nomination, a local Memphis journalist Larry Williams spoke to Hayes by phone a few hours before the ceremony was broadcast across America. Williams described him as ‘detached as black coffee’ but quietly superstitious and anxious not to talk about the Academy Awards directly. A part of Hayes’ reluctance was brought about by a disappointing night at the Grammy Awards, where he dominated the nominations but only managed to win one consolation award. It was an emotionally bruising experience and one he did not want to repeat. When the Oscars came round it was a golden year, with Klute, The French Connection, The Last Picture Show and Shaft all in the mix. Hayes was nominated in two categories: Best Original Dramatic Score, where he lost out narrowly to Michel Legrand’s ‘Summer Of 42’; and Best Song where he dominated the category with the movie’s title tune, the triumphant ‘Theme From Shaft’, which Hayes himself described as ‘a shot heard around the world’. Only the third African-American to win an Oscar, after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier, Hayes walked tentatively on-stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion wearing a petrol-blue suit trimmed in white mink. He was uncharacteristically nervous at the podium and could only mumble a few words of thanks, dedicating the Oscar to his grandmother, Mrs Rushia Wade, who was sitting in the audience next to his now empty seat. She had raised him as a child and was his guest of honour at the ceremony. Hayes had been born into a shockingly poor dysfunctional family and raised in a tin shack in Covington, Tennessee, forty miles north of Memphis. He was abandoned by his father when only eighteen months old. After his mother died prematurely in a mental asylum in Bolivar, Tennessee, he was formally adopted by his grandparents and raised in Memphis from the age of six. Poverty and deprivation had hounded Hayes throughout his young life. According to the black music magazine Wax Poetics, ‘Hayes’s humble beginnings – from sleeping in abandoned cars and dropping out of school because he didn’t have decent clothing to watching his sister and grandmother get sick from hunger – would haunt him through adulthood.’ The memory of a mother incarcerated, screaming and then sedated in a psychiatric hospital had given him a deep-seated anxiety that his mother’s illnesses might be hereditary. Deanie Parker, Stax’s head of publicity, once said, ‘When I first met Isaac, he had two shirts – one red Ban-Lon and one yellow Ban-Lon – a pair of khaki pants, and one pair of shoes that didn’t have laces. He lied his way up into Stax, saying he could play this and that. He was learning all the time, he had a symphony in his head.’
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