If the third time were to charm, it would need to be nearer the talent, sound better than an abandoned grocery store, and allow for a secondary cash flow. “We made the decision to move to a location where we could have a record shop and a studio combined,” Jim says, “the record shop being the primary means of survival for the studio.”
While searching Memphis for a suitable location, they were influenced by the recent success of Hi Records. In 1958, this offshoot of a record distributorship established itself in a movie theater and quickly released more than a dozen records. At the end of 1959, Hi scored a national hit with “Smokie (Part 2)” by the Bill Black Combo, a band led by Elvis’s ex-bassist. “At that time, movie theaters were out of business,” says Estelle. Television was sinking the industry. “In Memphis, a lot of theaters were vacant.” After considering several other venues, Jim, Estelle, and Chips Moman decided on the Capitol Theater in South Memphis, at the corner of College and McLemore (pronounced “Mack-le-more”). Built in 1931, the Capitol had, after twenty-seven years of movies, briefly become a Pentecostal Holiness Church, then a square-dance venue on weekends. It was in a commercial area with a lot of foot traffic on the wide sidewalk, and in the lobby Estelle could establish a record stand. The rent was one hundred dollars per month, which the siblings felt they could manage. Jim recalls no consideration given to the studio’s geography, but Moman remembers being intent upon pursuing rhythm and blues and looking specifically for a space in an African-American neighborhood.
The neighborhood had no particular name. Residents called it either the south side, which encompassed a broader area, or College and McLemore, because that corner had been the center of the commercial district since the 1920s. Until the early 1950s, the area was mostly but not entirely white, with working-class families living in single-story bungalows; the two-story dwellings were usually duplexes. Some families expanded their homes, often to take in boarders. There were lumberyards and a rail yard nearby, and the McLemore streetcar ran straight downtown, connecting many husbands to jobs in the Ford Motor plant. Throughout the 1950s, whites were moving east and the neighborhood became increasingly African-American.
In addition to a recent government housing project called LeMoyne Gardens, built in 1940 for the African-American community, there were pockets of black housing elsewhere. The area just west of the Capitol Theater, beyond Neptune Street, had long been black, and was home to Booker T. Washington High School. “Those were the homes of the middle-class black in Memphis. Doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, as well as some professors at LeMoyne College, which was located nearby,” says Logan Westbrooks, who was raised there and later would work with Stax. “But this is segregated Memphis, and that was a white theater. As a black youngster, that theater would not be a concern of mine, not under any circumstances. I would not even be standing out there looking at the marquee, and I certainly wouldn’t be attending.” Other commerce at College and McLemore—“the corner”—had always been integrated. The theater was the anchor building in a complex that included a barbershop and other small businesses. On Sundays, at nearby Bellevue Park, there were regular football games, whites versus blacks; in a town of long memory, no one could recall racial altercations there. The area also had some musical history, though it was probably unknown to the Satellite staff; the famed Blackwood Brothers, one of white gospel music’s brightest lights, came from a church a couple blocks east of the Capitol, and songwriter Rev. W.H. Brewster, who composed “Move On Up a Little Higher” and “Surely God Is Able,” the first million-selling black gospel songs, preached for decades from a church several blocks away.
Satellite was not lost in space, even if they were a little directionless. The handful of white-oriented records they’d made had all stiffed; the one with the black group had drawn some attention. On McLemore, they’d be nearer to both groups instead of far from everything. Early in 1960, Satellite Records packed up their gear, the country mouse moving to the city. The Brunswick landlord’s daughter never did get recorded.
3. A Capitol Idea
1960
Booker T. Jones stood outside the second-floor nightclub and listened to the music. The Club Handy was perhaps the most storied of all the Beale Street joints, the one from which B.B. King was launched, the one where Bobby “Blue” Bland cut his teeth. This club never closed, attracting all the musicians after their own gigs to jam, to “cut heads”—play unfettered and for themselves, without the restraints of pleasing an audience. Booker, who would soon become a pillar for the foundation of Stax Records, was only in high school, but he already knew the insides of many clubs—mostly from the bandstand’s perspective, a high schooler substituting for the regular player who’d taken a night’s society gig or gone on the road with some of the marquee talent that regularly passed through Memphis.
“These bandleaders had to come to my house,” Booker explains about his teenage years, “persuade my mom and dad that they were okay and to let me go with them. Most of the time I was playing baritone sax or piano, but I did have that Silvertone guitar and a little amp. We’d be in these cow pasture joints playing up-tempo blues, and when it gets a little too late and a little too loud and the sheriff is in there and everybody’s dancing and it’s hot and it’s grinding and the guitar gets turned up and it starts to crunch—I could make that guitar do that. And I’d make five or six bucks a night with people like [local bandleaders] Robert Tally and Johnny London and Tuff Green.”
A young Booker T. Jones.
Booker took the nightclub gigs as they came, and the lessons that came with them. Dexterous on several instruments, Booker often subbed on bass with Willie Mitchell’s popular band, and with one led by Al Jackson Sr. Al’s son, Al Jackson Jr., soon to be Booker’s bandmate and a driving force at Stax, became a strong—maybe strong-armed—influence. “I never worked with anyone who thought keeping time was so important,” says Booker of Al Jr. “Al, if I would rush or slow down, he would yell and curse at me—onstage, in front of people. He would hit you over the head with the drumstick if one eighth note or a sixteenth note was off. I mean, he was up and cussing. Al Jackson’s place onstage was behind me and the important thing for me was to keep on time so I didn’t get hit, so he didn’t throw anything or yell at me. That’s pretty good incentive for a fourteen-year-old playing with a borrowed bass.”
Booker had been inside Curry’s Club Tropicana, the Flamingo Room across Beale Street (where his future bandmates Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn saw his reflection in the mirror from the stairwell), the Plantation Inn in West Memphis. He’d played for white rednecks in Millington and for African-American society in South Memphis. But the Club Handy remained a mystery. Where the other clubs hired larger groups like Willie Mitchell’s band, Al Jackson Sr.’s band, the Newborn Family band, Tuff Green’s Rocketeers, Gene “Bowlegs” Miller’s Orchestra, or Ben Branch, Club Handy had a secret weapon: Blind Oscar. Oscar Armstrong played the Hammond organ, and he made the instrument into an orchestra. He had only a drummer and sometimes another instrument behind him, but that was all he needed. “Club Handy would chase us away,” Booker laughs. “‘You boys go on, get away from here.’ They didn’t need us kids to substitute. Oscar could fill that room with music and make it pulsate with the Hammond organ.”
Booker, when he first heard the organ, couldn’t identify it. “I heard the Hammond sound coming out of a Pentecostal church and coming out of Club Handy on Beale Street. Blind Oscar was playing bass on it, and I heard it from Jack McDuff records. But I wasn’t sure what the instrument actually was.” Pentecostal churches, also called sanctified churches or holy rollers, often featured a full band that would help the pastor whip the congregation to a spiritual frenzy. Booker had been warned not to go inside those churches, and he was chased away from Club Handy, so he experienced the intense power of the Hammond organ without being sure exactly what was creating it.
(He finally saw a Hammond organ when he asked his piano teacher what was always kept covered across the
room. “I thought it was a china cabinet,” he remembers. His teacher demonstrated the instrument but admonished him not to become entranced by it as he could not afford the lessons he’d need. Soon, Booker was throwing a paper route after school to pay for those lessons, folding the newspapers outside Phineas Newborn’s house, so he could hear the great jazz pianist practice.)
By the late 1950s, going from a Memphis club to the national stage was an established career path. Several decades earlier, a band teacher at Manassas High School in North Memphis named Jimmie Lunceford had taken his students to New York, where he quickly earned the house gig at Harlem’s Cotton Club, from which both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway had recently broken out. Lunceford’s Orchestra was famed through the 1930s. B.B. King had leapfrogged from a Beale Street talent show to headlining the Club Handy to becoming a national star by 1951. Rufus Thomas had put Sun Records on the map in 1953, and Sun soon launched Junior Parker (Bobby Bland was his valet), Rosco Gordon, Howlin’ Wolf, and then Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. Bobby “Blue” Bland became his own star. Johnny Ace and Johnny Burnette too. In the jazz world, Phineas Newborn went from local clubs to prestigious New York recording artist in 1956.
While the pay for a musician in southern cities was not as high as for a doctor or lawyer, the job had as much respect. “If the Dixie Hummingbirds came through town, or Pops Staples and the Staple Singers, or Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers came through, they were ambassadors of hope,” says Rev. Jesse Jackson, a future Stax artist who was raised in the rural South. “These were bona fide stars. They belonged to us.” Musicians were pollinators, traveling with the wind of applause beneath their wings, serving not the practical matters of an MD or jurist but rather the essential spiritual side, serving the soul. “So much of our survival capacity came through music and imagination,” Rev. Jackson continues. “People living in the worst of conditions, picking cotton or tobacco, or waiting tables, against all odds—music creates for us a great sense of imagination.”
Standing in front of the Capitol Theater, Jim Stewart was approached by a neighborhood boy, African-American, less than ten years old. A white man in the neighborhood was not unusual—if by 1960 the area was weighted more toward blacks, it was still plenty mixed. But no one had poked around the shuttered theater in a long time, and the lad—William C. Brown—had been dreaming of that stage inside nearly all his life. “Jim Stewart was standing outside looking at the building and I was a little kid. So I asked him, ‘What are you getting ready to do?’ He said, ‘It’s going to be a recording studio.’ And I said, ‘I sing.’ Just like that. He started laughing. So when he opened the door, I ran under his arm, right into Stax.” He would soon work for Estelle in the record store, then sing for Stax with the Mad Lads and learn there to engineer recordings.
The neighborhood movie theater where Stax would make its home. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)
Brown set the model for getting in the door—walk right in, sit right down, baby let your mind roll on—though it wasn’t quite Stax yet. The company was still called Satellite. Nor was it yet a recording studio. “I had already mortgaged my house, and then to get the operating capital, I had to refinance it,” says Estelle. “I’m one of these that likes to take a chance.” Money in hand, they began transforming the building. “The theater was too big,” Estelle continues. “So we put a partition in. Up on the stage where the screen usually was, that made a good control room, set above the theater floor.” They built a wall with a large window so Jim could see the performers. The slanted floor helped deaden the sound, keeping it controllable.
The kids in Packy’s band, when not in high school classes, helped with the renovation. It would be their rehearsal space when sessions weren’t going on. “It was a very big room,” says Steve Cropper, estimating the studio as two thirds of the theater’s original size; the Capitol had been a neighborhood theater, not a movie palace, but it seated several hundred. “We had to take the seats out and a lot of the bolts wouldn’t come out of the concrete. Packy Axton and I would spend hours with a hammer trying to break these things off so we could lay down carpet.”
“We did the acoustic stuff ourselves,” says Estelle. “We were always do-it-yourself. We put down carpets, we zigzagged acoustic tile down the walls. I had made some drapes for the studio in Brunswick, and we hung those all the way from the ceiling. That stayed there a long time because it was too hard to get down.”
“Jim Stewart and I built these sound panels out of pegboard and burlap,” says Steve. “And we put windows in them, so we could see each other—separate the sounds but have eye contact.”
Inside the control room was the original Altec Voice of the Theater speaker, eight feet tall and five feet wide. It had filled the building with the sound of James Cagney’s bullets and Lash LaRue’s snapping whip, and since the studio only needed to hear it in the control room, they could keep the volume low and get very clear playback. The original echo chamber was the men’s bathroom, tiled from the theater days.
The theater was one entrance in a strip of several adjoining businesses. Immediately to the east, sharing a wall, was the Capitol Barber Shop. Beyond that, a shoeshine stand, then a beauty shop, and on the corner a small grocery store and produce stand, complete with a soda fountain serving kids cherry Cokes after school. West from the theater was a TV and small-appliance-repair service, and then a beer joint that had a variety of names (and commonly known, later, as Slim Jenkins’ Joint, though it was never incorporated as that). As the Stax musicians matured, their foot traffic shifted to the west, from the soda fountain to where people took their blues home in a brown paper bag.
That commercial strip was a complete universe in which the kids could orbit. “One end was a food store, and the other way was May’s Grill,” says future Mar-Key Don Nix. “May was an alcoholic lady, white, and she lived in the place. She’d just pass out at night, wake up in the morning, and take off again. Carl Cunningham, who became the Bar-Kays’ drummer at Stax, was the shoeshine boy at the barbershop. Everybody hung out together and got along. And that was the neighborhood. We’d rehearse all day sometimes, go down to May’s Grill and eat lunch. We’d go to the food store and get sliced baloney and crackers. It was like a job almost, though you didn’t get any money for it. But we were learning something.”
The theater’s entrance was midblock. The ticket booth was still out front, and just inside was the lobby, with the concession stand forming a triangular area that guided you through the curtain and into the theater. Estelle Axton saw the concessions space and saw opportunity—a home for her record shop. “I had been selling records all along,” she says. “Now I’m trying to build some stock. This was a largely black neighborhood so I had to get into the rhythm and blues records, and I’m still buying the other kind too because I’m still working at the bank.” No one gave real consideration to the advantages that would develop—no one conceived what would develop: The store would be a way to gauge what shoppers were buying, would provide immediate customer response to new and developing songs, and would yield a working library so writers and musicians could keep current. The initial purpose was plain and simple: cash flow to help pay the rent.
The studio’s first real boost came from the postman. He heard about the new place in the neighborhood and spread the news. That he was retired and that the studio wasn’t on his old route—well, this is a story filled with such improbabilities. The postman’s name was Robert Tally, and he was also a keyboard player and bandleader.
Rufus Thomas, left, at the textile mill, watching the vats, making up songs.
“A fella by the name of Robert Tally came by my house and told us that there’s a new recording studio over there at the corner of McLemore and College,” says Rufus Thomas, whose work at Stax would soon make him known as the Funkiest Man Alive but whose superlative then might have been Busiest, as he was working several jobs to make ends meet (despite his local and national fame as an entertain
er). He worked full-time at a textile mill, with half an hour to get from there to his afternoon shift on radio. But even on the job, music was on his mind. “I’m watching the cloths fill up in these big old vats,” he says, “and I’m bobbing my head up and down as I watch them, trying to make up songs.” In addition to his work at Sun Records, he’d recorded for Meteor and was active in several other studios around town. “Tally said, ‘I think you oughta go over there.’”
Musicians had been crossing proscribed thresholds in the city for years. B.B. King had gotten his radio show on WDIA by walking through the front door on a rainy day and asking for an audition. Howlin’ Wolf walked into Sun, having heard that the white man Sam Phillips would give you a fair shake. The door Elvis walked through was metaphorical, but his success grew from his knowledge of music on the other side.
Tally had heard about the studio from a mortician in the neighborhood with whom he wrote songs. They’d gone there and cut some demos, been hospitably treated. “They had this Ampex 350 recorder,” says Tally, impressed by the gear purchased with funds from Estelle’s mortgage. “So I told Rufus Thomas, ‘Hey, man, let’s go over there and do some demos on McLemore.’ And that’s how we got hooked up.”
Uninvited, Rufus and his seventeen-year-old daughter Carla drove the mile and a half from their home. “We came right off the street,” says Rufus, “went right in.” In the lobby, they’d have been greeted by Estelle’s Satellite Record Shop: boxes of records spread across the candy counter, and by Estelle herself. She was a radio hound, and would have known Rufus by voice if not by sight; when Jim came forward from the back, he recognized Rufus from his rounds promoting the Veltones. Rufus, however, reveals that he remained suspicious. “At that time, really, I thought nothing about white folks,” he says, as frank as he is funky. “Nothing at all. When I was young, I had some rough experiences—wrong experiences, bad experiences—with white folk. I’m thinking that all white folks are the same. But I know I had to work, and the white folks had the jobs so I did what I had to do. It took me some time to get these things outta my system, and my system was pretty tight.”
Respect Yourself Page 4
