Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Jim, too, had found what he wanted to do, even if the monetary rewards were not yet evident. “Music can bring people together, emotionally as well as socially,” he reflects. “You begin to see inside of each other’s minds and understand where we came from. We were looking for good talent, it didn’t matter how old, how black, how white. We were looking for good writers, good musicians, creative people. Once we opened the studios on McLemore, I don’t think we cut any more pop or white records for a long time. It was as if we cut off that part of our lives that had existed previously, and never looked back.” That change may have been market-driven—Jim’s white records had flopped, his black ones had sold. But there were plenty of white people who couldn’t have worked with African-Americans, no matter the success. Jim was feeling the power of the music in his soul. “As it grew, it didn’t matter whether I was getting encouragement. It was striking an emotional fire within me and that was all I was going by. I had no way of knowing whether it was going to be successful or not, I just knew it moved me.”

  4. The Satellite’s Orbit

  1960–1962

  The Satellite Record Shop drew in life’s blood and pumped it to the enterprise. Estelle hung speakers outside the entrance to attract passersby—the trolley stopped near the store’s entrance, and those extra-wide sidewalks on this active commercial street could foster a real neighborhood bustle. “College and McLemore was kind of like the Times Square of Memphis,” says Don Nix. “At night, there was lots of lights from the grocery store and all the shops. Everybody hung out and was friends. [Future Mad Lads] William C. Brown and John Gary Williams, they’d be out on the street corner singing doo-wop just like in the movies.”

  The record store lured the kids. “We would dance out on the sidewalks,” says William Bell, who’d soon sign with the company as a vocalist. “I’m sure it was good for business because the kids dancing would attract potential buyers. Satellite Record Shop was like the entertainment center for the neighborhood.”

  “They gave me a job working around the place when it first opened,” says William C. Brown, the kid who’d run under Jim’s arm when he’d opened the door. “One thing about it—you could go in Stax as a floor sweeper and end up a producer or writer or a star.”

  One of those customers who’d work his way back to the studio was Booker T. Jones. “We never had a record store in our neighborhood before,” he says. “It was something of an oasis for me. Before that I had to drive twenty minutes out to Sears to look at records, and all the records there were country. At Satellite, you could listen to your record at the counter. That’s the first place I heard Ray Charles, the first place I heard John Coltrane. Going there was an enlightening experience. I listened to hundreds of records, for hours, and I never had any money to buy anything.”

  Listeners suited Estelle just as much as buyers. She’d quiz the kids about what they liked, and why, and then share that information with the budding writers and musicians. “She positioned herself with that record shop to be the research and development division for Stax Records,” says Deanie Parker, who began working for Mrs. Axton in 1960. “Estelle had more common sense than twenty people put together.” All the kids warmed to her, and when she wasn’t referred to as “Miz Axton,” they called her Lady A.

  Estelle studied the radio, and she would do her own buying at the distributorship because she knew what she wanted. “I had very faithful customers,” she says. “I had a card system. When they’d buy ten records, I’d give them a free one of their choice. And the minute they’d give me their name, I’d pull the card, see what they like, and I’d play whatever I had bought at the distributorship. My brother always said that anybody who’d come in with twenty dollars, I’d get nineteen of it—leave them enough money to get home on.” And her store wasn’t only for moving product; it was also for developing it. “I could also test the records they made in the back. If I had one that several customers said, ‘Give me one of those too,’ I could tell them in the back, ‘Go ahead and press that one, it’ll sell.’ That’s why we were successful with nearly everything we put out for a few years—we tested them at home before we let them go.”

  The studio was also developing relationships with the disc jockeys, especially at Memphis’s two black radio stations. Jim could take them a test copy of a record, and they’d add it to their rotation. Audience response could be judged by requests at the record shop. “We’d either get calls for it or we didn’t,” says Jim. “They’d come in, wouldn’t know the name, just a line. I used to spend Friday nights, Saturdays, and Saturday nights in the record shop if we weren’t cutting. They’d get their checks, the winos were in—it was a great experience for me and one of the happiest times in my life, working behind the counter and really dealing with the consumer, finding out his preferences in music. I would spend as much time as I could in there.”

  The trade was in 45s—seven-inch pieces of vinyl lacquer with one song on each side spinning at forty-five rotations per minute. And usually, it was just the one song that mattered, the A-side. A few artists released albums, but mostly these were after-the-fact collections of singles; making statements in a series of songs—the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On—was a concept years from commonplace. The business was built around the hit. And there was no better place to read the winds than at record stores. Estelle’s, with its turntable at the front, its young, hip, and vocal crowd tuning in, drew DJs and traveling stars, promotions men and label representatives, because she was an outspoken and articulate critic, and they liked to hear her assessment. “Rufus Thomas, Dick ‘Cane’ Cole, Al Bell, and a lot of the disc jockeys hung out,” Don says. “We all knew who they were. They were stars to us. And if Solomon Burke or other stars came through town, the next morning they’d come through Stax.”

  Another character who’d hang out at the record store was Estelle’s husband, Everett. He’d arrive in the evenings after his factory job with a quart of Stag beer in a brown paper bag, replenishing his supply from the neighborhood store. He smoked Picayune cigarettes, a strong, caporal tobacco (the American version of the French Gauloises) with the motto “Pride of New Orleans.” He wore black brogue irons (a metal-tipped work shoe), white socks, and his work clothes. He was mostly quiet—grumbling occasionally about the lateness of the hour. “I’m not certain that Everett was ever very comfortable being around an organization that was predominantly African-American,” says Deanie Parker. “I certainly never felt the warmth from Everett that I experienced from Estelle.” Everett had his house riding on Stax’s success. His discomfort participating in race mixing was sometimes palpable, but he mostly kept it to himself. An investment is an investment.

  And his wife was her own person, proceeding according to her own ways. “Estelle was the nucleus,” says Marvell Thomas, Rufus’s son. “She is what made Stax Records be Stax Records. Her attitudes about people and her love for people was the reason why the racial harmony existed in that place. Everybody loved her. Black, white, green, purple, we all liked Estelle.”

  As the dust began to settle—“’Cause I Love You” racked up a powerful thirty or forty thousand copies in sales—Jim Stewart saw what was before his eyes: Carla Thomas. She was young, radiant, and possessed a real talent. When there was a performance by WDIA’s Teen Town Singers, eyes always stopped on Carla.

  Carla Thomas with Al Jackson Jr. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  “Carla was somebody we was always oohing and ahhing,” Wayne Jackson says. “It was like a fraternity house in that studio. We’d show up and nothing would get done for an hour or two while we talked about everybody that wasn’t there. We always said Marvell had a better ass than Carla, and then we’d fall out laughing.”

  “Everybody was infatuated with Carla,” says Duck Dunn. “Her voice, and she was a beautiful girl—how could you not love Carla Thomas?”

  Carla would pass time on the piano, and Jim began to really see her, to hear her. With the passion and inno
cence of a teenager imagining love, Carla would pour her whole heart—and have fun pouring her whole heart—into her favorite self-penned folly. “I knew ‘Gee Whiz’ was a great song when I first heard Carla do it,” says Jim. “A hit record. You just get this feeling.” Seventeen at the time, Carla had written the song two years before in her tenth-grade notebook. “I wrote short stories and songs and I just was enjoying myself,” she remembers. “I was in the glee club and all the little clubs. I don’t know how I wrote it. I was through within thirty minutes. It just kind of flowed, like angels came down and gave it to me.”

  Jim’s concern was keeping the lights on at the studio, but with “’Cause I Love You” working its way into the public eye, and with the Atlantic money in the bank, he recognized an opportunity. They could raise their stake, sinking their income into another record. “I was at the bank, so all I could work was nights and on weekends,” Jim says. Juggling a variety of responsibilities—including the arrival of his third child—Jim relied on Chips Moman, who was always ready to take the reins. “I was thinking, Now that I’ve got a hit record,” Jim says, “I need to make the next one better quality.” Jim didn’t yet believe in his facility—the Ampex tape machine, seven microphones, and a four-channel mixer—and he sent Chips to record Carla at the Hi Records studio in the former Royal movie theater, the next neighborhood over. But when Jim heard the result of the session, he was dissatisfied: “It was too fast. I didn’t hear the magic. So I cut it again in our studio.” It was folly upon folly: three or four years into a business that was at best a crapshoot, he’d had one lucky roll, and now, with a finished song in the can—paid for, including studio rental, string players, and everything—he was going to pay again for the same session. Only this time, he’d be in charge.

  The technology in late 1960 in Memphis still demanded that all the musicians and instruments be recorded together, live to tape. If one person messed up, all would have to start over. The background singers shared Carla’s mike; she’d step back to allow them room, they’d then make room for her. Jim hired string players again, and hired Robert Tally to write out arrangements. Jim was, for the second time on the same song, laying out pay for about ten musicians, a very serious investment for a company that was, to date, a losing proposition. (The standard payment was fifteen dollars per musician per session, and if the song got released, it got filed with the union and they received full pay—about sixty-five dollars.) The day of Carla’s redo, the investment seemed to go from bad to worse: the string players arrived, but Tally’s arrangements didn’t. Leaving the studio with everyone there and the clock running, Jim drove three miles to Tally’s house, 1425 Eloise Road. His furious knocking woke Tally—he’d played a gig the previous night, it ran late, he was still asleep . . . and he’d forgotten to write the charts.

  Jim hightailed it back. “What a hassle that session was,” he says. “An all-day affair.” A union session was supposed to run three hours; if it went over, it was considered another session, with additional pay. But the Memphis union and the Memphis players were more lax than in the big cities. That day, they made up a simple arrangement they could play without fully written parts. “String players never make up parts as they go along,” says Marvell, “like horn players do all the time. But they did that day.” With Jim producing, the song landed in the right spot. “Gee Whiz” captures Carla’s innocence and her earnestness. It’s a silly little song, as Jim has described it, but the piece is really about Carla’s delivery, which all the supporting instruments bring out. The strings and backing vocals give it a maturity and presence that would usher it from the youth market to broader appeal. Jim pressed copies, then watched somewhat agog as it took off, first in Memphis, then in St. Louis, then beyond.

  “I got a call from an old pal of mine, Hymie Weiss,” says Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler, referring to a music business insider behind an array of hits (“one of the lovable roughnecks in the record business,” as Wexler describes Weiss). “[Hymie] was in Memphis and he said, ‘Hey, schmuck, you got a hit record down here. It’s Carla Thomas, ‘Gee Whiz.’ He said, ‘If it wasn’t you I’d pick it up for myself. You better come down and get it.’”

  Jerry Wexler telephoned Jim, putting on the harrumph: Atlantic had signed Carla, he said, so why was Jim sneaking out records on her? Jim’s first argument with his mentor ensued. Not three moons prior, Jim Stewart had been thrilled when Atlantic picked up his record and made a distribution arrangement. With their help, “’Cause I Love You” had sold tens of thousands of copies, reaching people at greater distances than the fledgling company could ever have reached. So now, the same opportunity presenting itself, Jim Stewart had the opposite reaction; he bristled at Atlantic’s intrusion. Why? His legal angle was that Carla was a different act from Rufus and Carla, and Atlantic had optioned the duo. But the gut of his reaction was emotional. The first time Wexler had asked, the second time he’d come in bullying, and Jim’s back ridged when he was being told what to do. Being told what to do is one step from being told what not to do, and Jim Stewart did not want to be told he had no right to release his own records how and when he wanted. He was an independent.

  The disagreement led to a negotiation. Jim’s brief taste of success had made him aware of several issues, one being that “I was not making the money. So I had been contemplating going into independent distribution.” If he cut out Atlantic, he’d make more money per record. Wexler told him, “You’d be making a big mistake. You don’t know how bad collections are. You need a sales force.” Jim understood that a hit had killed many a burgeoning record label: Distributors were known not to pay for what they ordered, and labels found themselves in debt—they’d paid for the recording, the shipping, the manufacturing, and received back nothing. Allying with Atlantic would allow Jim to focus on making records, with the burden of distributing them, and collecting the money, left to others. Jim decided he could forsake distribution, but he wanted his own label, as opposed to delivering master tapes that would be released on Atlantic. A “production deal” was arranged, with Stax delivering the masters for Atlantic to manufacture and distribute on the Stax label, and to pay Stax a portion of the profits, approximately fifteen cents per single sold. “So we made the contract, five years,” Jim says. The contract was a handshake, so the terms were general, not specific. Specificity on the front end would have solved a lot of problems, but as Jim recollects, “In those days, no one hired an attorney to do these things. It was a one-on-one deal, and my deal was with Jerry Wexler.”

  In three months, “Gee Whiz” went to number five in the nation, breaking into the pop top ten. Working with Atlantic clearly had its benefits.

  And its obligations. Carla had begun college in Nashville, but Atlantic wanted to promote her in New York as part of an R&B revue show. To secure her appearance, Wexler boarded a plane for Memphis. Satellite’s two hits were different enough, interesting enough, and successful enough—who were these people and what was this place? He found the theater-cum-studio a marvel: If the hits hadn’t proven it, there’d be no reason to think this facility could produce them. He wanted to take Jim Stewart to dinner—smoothing any ruffled feathers from their recent renegotiation, and also to meet the It-girl, Carla Thomas. (Atlantic had established itself through vocalist Ruth Brown, so Jerry had a particular interest in meeting the new female vocalist.)

  There was, however, no place in Memphis or its surrounding environs that a mixed table could dine. Jerry and Jim: white. Carla, Rufus, and Lorene Thomas, Carla’s mother: black. Not in public in Memphis in 1960, or for several more years.

  So they decided to meet in Jerry’s hotel room, where they’d order room service. “We’re going to his hotel room to talk—money that is,” says Rufus Thomas. “I’m sharp, I got on my good clothes, and I’m cleaner than nineteen yards of chitlins, and you clean them up good enough to eat ’em.”

  At the front door of the Claridge Hotel, the party was reminded how far they were from the embrace of Jim’s studio
. “Instead of going in the front,” says Wexler, “we had to go in the back way. Blacks couldn’t use the front door.”

  “I told them, ‘Hell no, I ain’t riding no service elevator,’” Rufus remembers. “‘Don’t have to ride it, won’t. See, I can go back right back in the street where I was and forget you people. I am not riding that elevator!’ But my wife said, ‘Well, maybe let’s do this this one time, and you never have to do it again.’ So I did, went up on that service elevator.”

  The contingent—blacks and whites, dressed for dining—traipsed around the building and through the slop alley to the back door. Wexler never forgot Rufus’s resigned comment: “And Rufus says, ‘Here it is again, walking through the garbage cans.’”

  Jim Stewart recoils today as he recalls the event, citing the freight elevator as possibly the most embarrassing event of his life. He and Carla had become very close, grateful for the gifts each had shared with the other. They’d known only respectful, pleasant terms. Here, the real world intruded; the alley, the freight elevator—the humiliation.

  Privately ensconced, the group began rebuilding their bridges. Dinner arrived, wheeled in on carts by members of the hotel staff. “We had dinner in there and we talked,” Rufus remembers. “They talked real good about what Satellite and Atlantic was gonna do, how they were gonna market the records, about New York and Tennessee, the North and the South coming together for one common cause, and that was records.” Amends were made, new promises put forth, and the company left in good cheer.