“I see Jim right now in that little section between the door and the control room,” says Al Bell, recalling his first meeting with Jim Stewart, long before they knew how the Fates would entwine their lives. “I saw a little small guy, short, but a smile on his face, and I immediately related to him. He was bringing me an African-American record, and I was excited when I heard it. I think it was a chemistry starting at that early stage between Jim and myself.”
The Veltones’ record brought a smile to Jim Stewart’s face after he released it in 1959 and nationally distributed Mercury Records, home to Frankie Laine and Patti Page, offered a few hundred dollars for national distribution rights. It did not take off, but there was some money in this game after all.
2. A New Planet
1960
Memphis is a city that hums and thrums. Its song is constant, a part of the soil, river, and air, and because it is everywhere, it can be hard to detect. Most white Memphians have been oblivious to the city’s song, largely because African-American culture is essential to it, and most white people—certainly well into the 1960s—were trained to disregard that culture. Memphis is the capital of the mid-South, a vast rural agricultural area that spreads for hundreds of miles, encompassing a world divided between the landed and the landless, the rich and the poor. Cotton was king, and cotton determined who had bread and who had butter, who lived in the big house and who worked for the big house, who dressed in silk and who wore flour sacks. All roads led to Memphis, for there the cotton was paid for and shipped to the world beyond. With the cotton came the field hands, and with the field hands, the city’s tune grew ever more intense.
This paradigm had been set since the early 1900s, as the Mississippi Delta became more cultivated. By the 1920s, Beale Street had become the Harlem of the South. Beale is on the south side of Memphis, which is the Delta side—no need to have them getting all the way to the center of town—and it runs about five blocks extending from the river. Beale was the backbone of a thriving black neighborhood. Beale Street was like New Orleans’s Storyville, and like what West Memphis later became—the laws were less enforced, the good times more pronounced.
One Memphian who heard the city’s song, and who helped others tune their ears to it, including Elvis Presley, Packy Axton, and many future Stax stars, was a disc jockey named Dewey Phillips. A white man totally unsuited for broadcasting—his tone was not mellifluous, his diction not precise, his patter not soothing—he pestered his way onto an evening show at a Memphis station that was doing so poorly in the ratings that it was willing to take a chance on him. The notion at WHBQ was that, because WDIA went off the air at sundown, maybe they could capture some of that listening audience by playing black music at night. But none of their dulcet-toned DJs knew anything about African-American music. Dewey started in 1949 with fifteen minutes, soon had three hours, and by the late 1950s, in addition to his nighttime show, he was on for the kids after school, simulcasting on TV and radio. The success of someone so patently unsuitable for the job is a testament to the South’s long embrace of the eccentric.
Dewey exploded the constricted 1950s notions of radio programming. He did not play songs from a dedicated genre throughout his show. He programmed by essence, hearing the similarities between Bill Monroe, Hank Ballard, the Spaniels, Louis Jordan, and Bob Wills. He’d follow a Sister Rosetta Tharpe rocking guitar gospel song with a Tommy Dorsey big beat, and if you thought the twain should never meet, his program either confirmed your notions of the world’s imminent demise or it knocked down the walls of the box you had never realized you were living in. Elvis’s career at Sun was a tribute to Dewey—a bluegrass song played as a blues? A blues song given a country swing? Like “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” his first Sun release, Elvis regularly condensed Dewey’s three-hour program onto two sides of a 78-RPM disc.
“We used to listen to the Grand Ole Opry,” says Donald “Duck” Dunn, who would became the bassist in Stax’s house band, “but when I heard Dewey play Little Richard, Bill Doggett, and Bo Diddley, it just changed my life.”
“I used to listen to Dewey Phillips with the kids,” says Estelle Axton. “I wouldn’t even know how to go to the office and have a conversation if I didn’t listen to Dewey the night before.” Her home was in a modest working-class neighborhood established in the early 1940s, part of the city’s constant march east, absorbing farmland. (Jim always preferred a more rural feel, favoring the area north of town, which is where his two studios had so far been located.) Though neighborhoods were still segregated by race, listening to Dewey Phillips wasn’t considered radical or communist. “The neighborhood kids used to come to our house,” says Estelle’s daughter Doris. “This was before she got into the record company—and we’d play canasta. Mother was part of the group. She’d set up two tables in our tiny house—just me and the guys and Mother, no other girls. Dewey Phillips was a big thing for us to listen to.”
Between Dewey Phillips, WDIA radio, and the sound made on the streets of downtown Memphis when black and white shoulders rubbed together, when rich and poor, rural and urban converged on the sidewalks, someone like Packy Axton couldn’t help but dive headfirst into the world that the segregationists believed held no worth. And there were increasingly more people like Packy. Many, in fact, went to his high school, and the board of education had, however inadvertently, established a place for them to meet.
“The smoking room at Messick High School was a dungeon,” says Don Nix, who would soon play saxophone in the Mar-Keys, one of Memphis’s early white R&B bands. “The school had designated a smoking area for boys—girls couldn’t go in there—and that’s where we all smoked. Duck Dunn, Steve Cropper, Charlie Freeman, Packy Axton, and Terry Johnson—the first Mar-Keys guys.” Many of these kids would become core players at Stax, and all would help establish the label. They lived in the neighborhood around Messick High, and they hung out together after school, sometimes taking the number 57 Park Avenue bus downtown to look in the shop windows, especially where musical instruments were displayed.
“This music was everywhere!” says Terry Johnson, who would play drums in the Mar-Keys. “We would sneak over to the Plantation Inn in West Memphis and get the band to buy liquor for us, and they would let us in Curry’s Tropicana in North Memphis, or we’d spend all night down on Beale by the old Club Handy and listen to Evelyn Young play saxophone, sitting on the curb with beer that some black guy had gone around the corner and bought for us. That was how it got started.”
“Sometimes they’d let us in and sometimes they wouldn’t,” Steve Cropper remembers. Soon Steve’s guitar would become a signature of the Stax sound, but in high school he was still absorbing diverse influences. “They knew we were underage, but on Beale Street they’d let us stand in the stairwell and you could look past the ticket booth and see a mirror in the back of the Flamingo Room, and you could see the reflection of the band in that mirror. The first time I saw [future bandmate] Booker [T. Jones] was in the Flamingo Room playing bass, an old red Gibson.”
The Mar-Keys inside the Stax recording studio on McLemore. L–R: Charles “Packy” Axton, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Wayne Jackson, Terry Johnson, Don Nix, Steve Cropper, Jerry Lee “Smoochy” Smith.
These young fans became a refraction of that reflection. After seeing an upperclassman in high school perform “Bo Diddley” at the talent show, Steve had begun saving up for a guitar. “Everybody in those days had a Sears and Roebuck catalog—we called it ‘the Wish Book,’ and my mom could attest to this: I mowed yards and I set bowling pins and did every little odd job I could do to save enough money to buy me an eighteen-dollar Sears Roebuck Silvertone guitar. When the truck pulled up, they said, ‘That’ll be a twenty-five-cent delivery charge.’ My mother always says, ‘I’m the one that loaned you that twenty-five cents to get that guitar.’”
The guitar needed tuning, the bridge was loose, and Steve couldn’t make much sense of the instrument. But there was a kid at school named Char
lie Freeman who was a guitar whiz. “He had been taking guitar lessons, and I asked him to help me,” Steve continues. “We went back in his bedroom and fixed it up and he started showing me a few things.” Steve and Charlie, tenth graders, began hanging out after school and soon friends were joining them, to listen. Charlie Freeman had an ear beyond his years and was fluent in jazz, R&B, and blues; he could dispense listening suggestions as well as technique. The duo wound up auditioning for a DJ who, impressed, offered them a spot on his weekly sock hop—if they could find a bass and drum. “Boy, we were asking everybody in school,” says Steve. “We found this kid, Terry Johnson, who played drums in his father’s country band. So he had a little bit of experience, even though he was only in the ninth grade.” Cropper’s friend Donald Dunn—he was already “Duck” back then, a redhead with a perennial grin—tried moving from the ukulele to the guitar, but couldn’t figure out what to do with the extra couple strings. He showed up one day with a bass guitar and found he had a natural feel for the bottom—he loved to dance, and the bass and drums dictated the rhythms. Steve found a Fender Princeton amplifier, and the electricity gave them the jolt to be heard over crowds. They got a gig at the Starlight Club, playing for three bucks a night and all the fried fish they could eat.
“Before I was with them,” says Don, “I’d go see them at Neil’s, across a bridge and down in a bog, somewhere outside town near the Millington Naval Base. It was the kind of place where people left their teeth at home so they wouldn’t break their dental work in a fight. They played Jimmy Reed, Bill Doggett’s ‘Hold It,’ James Brown. I heard Charlie [Freeman] saying, ‘Should we do the floor show?’ The floor show was Charlie, Steve, and Duck getting up on the bar and doing steps and moves together, then jumping onto the floor.” They called themselves the Royal Spades, explaining that they loved poker and a royal spade flush was the game’s highest hand. The name’s racist overtone smacks of teens believing they’re getting away with something, and reveals society’s blunted sensibility; the name would soon change.
One day at high school, Steve, the band’s lanky and serious leader, was approached by someone he’d seen in the smoking room. “This guy come up to me that I didn’t have any classes with, so I didn’t really know who he was. He says, ‘Hey, man, I hear you guys have a good band.’ He said, ‘I’d like to be in your band.’ And I said, ‘Well, we’re not looking for anybody. What do you do?’ And he said, ‘I play saxophone.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s real good, but we’re two guitars, bass, and drums, and we’re not really looking for any horns.’ I said, ‘How long you been playing?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’ve been taking lessons for three months.’ And I’m thinking, Yeah, okay, great. Somewhere in the conversation he mentioned something about his mother or his uncle having a recording studio and I went, ‘Oh really?’ And it ended with me saying, ‘Can you be at rehearsal this coming Saturday?’” Their musical interests were entwined, and soon Packy brought Steve to the studio. “He took me out to a garage where Jim Stewart had some equipment. That was the extent of the studio, but at least it was a start, a place to be.”
More than a place to be, it became a place to be themselves. These kids came from dry, hardworking worlds—Don’s father drove a truck for a small cleaners, Duck’s father drove a cab, and Steve’s was a railroad detective. The “studio” became their practice space, where they could live their Beale Street dreams. The boys helped move from the garage to Brunswick, and they helped Jim and Estelle clean the new place. Jim had to learn his way around this new equipment, so it was helpful to have the boys rocking and honking while he figured out how to make it all work. “Jim said we’d never make it,” Steve remembers. “Jim liked all kinds of music, and he was a country fiddler. I think he was looking to the pop market. But, to be loyal to his sister, he allowed Packy to bring his band out on Saturdays.” The players also met Chips Moman there, who regaled them with road stories—recording studios in California, touring with Gene Vincent after his hit, “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and fists flying and knives drawn on average Saturday nights outside Memphis.
“I’d put all those guys in my car on Saturday, with all those instruments, and we’d go out to Brunswick,” says Estelle, sounding more like a den mother than a record producer. “They’d jam and practice, jive, carry on. Jim knew the engineering—it doesn’t take much engineering for a one-track machine. The machine only had a few knobs, even I learned to run it. And that’s what we’d do on Saturday. They thought Packy was great because his mother owned half that company.”
Once Packy joined, an expanded horn section was natural. Don Nix was slow to master the guitar, but the fast talker and class clown had plenty of breath for the baritone sax and he’d recently seen how essential an instrument it was. Don’s uncle worked downtown in a seat-cover factory and spoke of a black trumpet player named Willie Mitchell who manned the assembly line with him. Mitchell led one of Memphis’s most swinging bands, and had a regular gig across the river. Don’s uncle didn’t take him there, but Don went on his own and was bowled over by the intensity of the horn section. “Now if you can imagine, white kids had never heard R&B music before. It was like going to another planet, a real good planet. It was just unbelievably good vibes—Where has this been?” Then Dewey and Elvis primed the pump, and Memphis’s young hep cats wallowed in the gusher.
“We wanted to sound like Willie Mitchell’s band,” Don continues. Don was a natural on the stage, where his class-clown antics won him applause instead of detention. “So we needed a trumpet player and we met Wayne Jackson. Wayne was a go-getter, a people person. He could play all the old standards. Somebody wanted to hear ‘Stardust,’ and we don’t know how to play it, but Wayne knew how so we could fake it. He was the only one from outside the Messick smoking-room guys.”
Wayne was from West Memphis, which is where Willie Mitchell held his regular gig. “Willie was my mentor,” says Wayne, who remembers sneaking out to see—or rather to hear—him. “At the back of the bandstand was a big fan that sucked out the smoke and hats and ladies’ wigs. And I would stand outside and listen to the band. So Willie Mitchell always sounded like: wwwwwuuhhhwuuuhhhhhwuhhhh. Then, when the Mar-Keys got together, we copied Ben E. King and Chuck Jackson and the local black bands of the day. They all had horns. It’s a hangover from the big bands, but all they could afford was one or two.” Wayne played trumpet; Don and Packy were on saxophones. Soon the band’s pay went up to ten bucks a night and all the beer they could drink.
“I was a pretty good student but after I found music . . . no more. I just knew I was gonna play music,” says Duck Dunn. “I looked in the mirror every night and tried to do Elvis or whatever Frankie Lymon was doing. We used to sneak over to the Plantation Inn in West Memphis and I just said to myself, Man, I can do this.” He began taking lessons in South Memphis, close to where Stax would soon move; his teacher was Larry Brown, the Plantation Inn bassist. “I had a feel that Larry taught me, and Bill Doggett’s records taught me, and Little Richard—I just wanted to kick ass. I didn’t know a whole lot of notes but I just wanted to make people smile. I was in love with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Five Royales, James Brown, Ray Charles—great R&B artists.”
While the band honed their chops, the adults figured out the business. One obvious issue facing them was cash flow, and the lack thereof. The rent in Brunswick was free—and they’d soon be ready to record the landlord’s daughter—but as they accumulated microphones, up to seven from four, and bought tape, no money was coming in to replace that which was going out. Estelle and Jim’s wife, Evelyn, took care of that. They cleaned the abandoned ice cream stand extending from the former grocery; it had a walk-up window. “We were looking for small dollars, not thousands of dollars,” Estelle explains (ever practical). “All I went through to run that ice cream place!”
During the summer, Estelle sent her kids to the ice cream stand before she got off work at the bank. “Packy and I would get in his old ’49 Ford, and it was our job to go out ther
e and open up the ice cream place,” says Doris. She and Packy didn’t get along. “He always called me the goody-goody.” Indeed, young Packy had already committed himself to a life of drink. “People said, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’” Don remembers. “Packy always said he wanted to be an alcoholic. He loved to drink.”
Packy was an established problem between Jim and his sister. There were two issues, one a principle, one personal. In principle, Jim was uncomfortable with any hints of nepotism. “None of my family worked at the company,” he says. “I wanted to run a company that was totally objective and gave people a chance. If it’s a small company and you’ve got a half dozen nieces and nephews and brothers and sisters, people would know they never have a chance of making it.” Personally, Packy aggravated Jim’s last nerve. His happy-go-lucky attitude, his irreverence, his carousing—these were antithetical to how Jim did business. (These same tensions also existed between Jim and Estelle’s husband, Everett.) When Jim solicited his sister’s backing, he knew Packy would be part of the package, but his eyes were on the new equipment, not the old conflicts.
The Brunswick studio building. The dairy bar was to the left, the train tracks to the right. (Courtesy of René Wu)
Meanwhile, tending to the business at hand—recording—they were constantly reminded of the location’s shortcomings. “We didn’t do a lot of renovations work at the Brunswick studio,” Jim explains. “We felt like it was temporary. It was too far out, too inconvenient for everybody. But it was better than the garage that we had worked in previously.”
Respect Yourself Page 3
