Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  But the waiters had noticed—and reported—the transgression of blacks and whites in consort. An invisible empire of cogs began turning and promptly the Memphis police knocked on Wexler’s door. “‘Open up! You got a woman in there,’” Wexler remembers them saying. “They were all long gone. I said, ‘Bring up the manager, I’m not opening up.’ I had an idea of them putting me in the trunk of a car and dumping me in Arkansas.” The errand for the manager allowed Wexler to scrawl a desperate note to his company in New York and put it in a stamped envelope. When the manager arrived, Wexler flung the door open and dashed to the hallway mail chute, praying for the letter’s New York arrival before the oxygen was depleted in whatever horrible chamber he was soon to be held.

  The management and the police saw the room was empty. “Someone saw these black people, including Carla, who was beautiful, and they figured there was unwarranted miscegenation happening on their premises.” Wexler wasn’t done. “I called the lieutenant in charge and said thanks for welcoming me to Memphis with this. I said, ‘This is Stone Age, and that’s what you are and your cops are, Stone Age.’”

  But Wexler left with what he wanted, and Carla performed in New York. “It was one of the highlights of my life,” says Carla. “The Brooklyn Paramount Theater. All I had was those two little songs. [She’d cowritten the B-side with Moman.] But people whose records I’d bought—Little Anthony, Jackie Wilson, Chuck Jackson—now I’m on the show with them.”

  5. A Banker and a Gambler

  1961–1962

  Some days the studio felt like a bad talent show, people hoping to be the next Carla Thomas—but their tenth-grade songs sounded like tenth grade, their performances juvenile. A neighborhood doo-wop group cut a pretty good piece with Chips Moman that Jim felt was worth releasing. The group renamed themselves for the producer; Atlantic did not pick up the Chips’ “You Make Me Feel So Good,” but it was a worthwhile exercise for Satellite. Everything was; it was all so new.

  Chips kept the studio active. He had a good ear, and plenty of time to audition those who felt they belonged in the studio making records, not in the front buying them. One player who made his way to the back was Floyd Newman, a saxophonist who had recently returned from college in Detroit. His family lived near the corner of College and McLemore. Last he’d seen, white people were watching movies at that address; four years later, black people were dancing outside the front door. “It was a record shop, and I went in there to buy some records,” he remembers. “Some of the musicians saw me and they hired me.” Floyd hung out with his old friend and fellow saxophonist Gilbert Caple, and they came up with a riff. “Gilbert and I, we were just messing around,” Floyd continues. “Goofing off. And I happened to put in that response, ‘Ooh, last night.’ It had the feel, and the feel is what sells songs.” Chips heard a song beneath the fun, and he put Gilbert and Floyd with Packy and his rowdy friends; Gilbert and Floyd were black, a bit older, and they could really play. So could some of Packy’s friends, but not all of them. Chips brought in his honky-tonk friend Jerry Lee “Smoochy” Smith, who had a piano riff that seemed like it would meld with Gilbert and Floyd’s idea, and it did.

  “We were just kids having a good time,” says Wayne. “Poor old Jim, it was life and death to him.” Chips could corral and focus their energies. “Jim was a nervous fellow,” Wayne continues, “took nerve pills. A country redneck fiddler in a black neighborhood—a banker really. And working on borrowed money. But Miz Axton was selling 45-RPM records to black kids and she knew they wanted to dance. She told us, ‘I want you to make a record these kids can dance to. And I want it to be an instrumental.’ So that’s how we came up with ‘Last Night.’” Wayne’s use of “we” is casual, but exactly who the “we” was would soon become a heated conflict.

  The studio setup in the early 1960s. (Drawing by Steve Cropper/Courtesy of René Wu)

  With the rehearsals taking shape, Chips called a recording session. Steve Cropper was on the session, and Duck Dunn was supposed to be, but his father had recently lost his job and, to earn money, he was working with a friend giving helicopter rides on weekends. “My dad was going through financial stuff,” says Duck. “He needed help.” Duck was giving other kids a thrill and missing his own. On bass was Lewie Steinberg, another older black player who, at twenty-seven, was active in the nightclub scene; he played with Al Jackson Sr.’s band (alongside Al Jr.), and with Willie Mitchell’s band (where Al Jr. also played, and Booker often subbed). “I was at home minding my own business and Gilbert Caple come by my house,” Steinberg says. Caple, one of the new song’s writers, invited him to the studio. “I said, ‘What studio and for what?’” Steinberg hadn’t been to Satellite yet; in fact, he’d just come from a tour through Louisiana, and his playing was saturated with a New Orleans feel that he lent to the song’s bottom.

  Somewhere between the country soul of Chips and Smoochy and the funky hearts of Floyd, Gilbert, and Lewie, the song “Last Night” emerged. It is, perhaps, the archetypal Memphis song of that era, the “What’d I Say” for locals. The horns tease out their opening notes, so playful; the rhythm—it’s surprisingly layered, like a comic team’s banter, and much too kinetic to hear without physically responding. The drummer (Curtis Green) was from the Plantation Inn and his playing suggests how raucous and fun that club must have been. As gleeful a song as ever recorded, the instrumental is punctuated by Floyd’s occasional vocal refrain—“Oooh, last night!”—hinting of salaciousness, of secrets being told between friends. It is fun, funkified.

  The sonic quality of the record is also great—it leaps out of the speakers, etched hot into the tape, with the needle in the red but not distorting. “Chips was actually at the controls,” says Jim of the production. “Insisted on it. Two little four-channel mixers tied together, and a little Ampex mono machine.” It’s a poker player’s recording, not a banker’s.

  Before its release, the tape sat on the shelf for weeks. Jim pursued his recordings with Carla, and Chips kept the studio humming. Time passed, the tape languished, an exercise in recording, another testing of the equipment. And that might have been the end of the story but for one important fan: Estelle. She heard the record’s blend of rhythm and blues and country, and knew, too, that instrumental songs were popular (it was thought by many that Hi Records stood for “hit instrumentals”). “I was selling those blues numbers,” she says, “and I could put two and two together.” She had Jim make a test pressing for the store’s turntable. “I had become close to WLOK and WDIA, talking to the disc jockeys,” says Estelle, referring to the two black music radio stations. When she played it for one of WLOK’s lead jocks, he took the copy to the station, swearing it was a hit. “From the very first day he put it on,” Estelle says, “people began stopping at the shop looking for that instrumental. They’d say, ‘I don’t know what it is, but it goes, “Ooh, last night.”’”

  While the requests continued, Jim’s attention was on Carla. He heard pop potential and took her to Nashville. “I thought I’d get a better string sound,” he says. “I was misleading myself, actually. I didn’t know what I had in that studio.” Soon he’d recognize the difference between the foothill sound of Nashville’s country and the thick funk of Memphis’s swamp, vowing never to cut an R&B record in Nashville again.

  “Jim was so involved with Carla and the other vocalists,” Estelle says, “he wasn’t pushing this instrumental bit. But because my son was in there, I was pushing that instrumental. They’d played it on the radio and they were coming into the shop to buy it but I didn’t have a product. It was getting very irritating.” Estelle believed it could sell nationally, and she played it for Jerry Wexler. “Mr. Wexler said, ‘It’s all right, it needs this, that, and the other.’ He used to say, ‘Just because it’s selling in Memphis doesn’t mean it’s a national hit.’ I said, ‘Mr. Wexler, I know enough about the record business in Memphis, Tennessee, that if it sells here, by God it’ll sell anywhere in the world.’ This was the hardest market. I kn
ew we had a product that would sell, and I knew we needed the money, and here we are wasting that time.”

  Weary of telling customers that the record wasn’t available, pining for the easy income, Estelle made a decision. “One night I was in the record shop, didn’t close till nine, my husband standing there anxious to go home. I said, ‘Nope, I’m not leaving here tonight till we settle something. We’re either going to put that record out or we’re going to pull that dub [copy] off the air.’ Jim and Chips came up about nine o’clock. Started out, I asked them in a nice way about the record. They began to hem and haw. Then I started crying, trying to get their sympathy. That didn’t work. I started cussing and my brother had never heard me cuss before. I blew his mind. He said, ‘All right, in the morning have Packy get the tape and take it to the plant for mastering.’ When I believe in anything, I’m going to keep on until I get it done.”

  The next day, Estelle had no trouble rousing the usually indolent Packy. “Packy went back to get the tape, starts to play it, and would you believe that about sixteen bars off the front end of that tape had been erased? We found out that they had taken that tape to Nashville when they cut Carla’s album, and someone had erased that up there. I said, ‘As many times as y’all have done that tape back there, there’s got to be another one with the same tempo.’” She adds, “To this day, I know exactly where the splice is in that record.” Before releasing it, Estelle insisted the band change its name; all-white kids playing black music and calling themselves the Royal Spades just wasn’t going to play. She suggested the Marquis. Words with a q, however, intimidated some of the band members, and this word—meaning noblemen—seemed unrelated in any way to the boisterous group. Estelle considered the movie marquee that hung over the front of the building, and the keys of the piano, and she overcame the challenge of the difficult letter by suggesting the Mar-Keys. Ah, phonetics. The boys could drink to that.

  “Nobody ever thought it was a record,” muses Don Nix. “And it wouldn’t have been a record had it not been for Miss Axton.” “Last Night” caught on quickly, going from a popular unreleased song on local radio to a regional and national hit, easing its way to number two on the R&B chart, number-three pop.

  “The first time I heard that song on the radio,” says Wayne Jackson, “I was driving to a gig and just as we got to the bridge on Lamar, it came on the radio. I damn near wrecked the Plymouth. It’s a onetime thing, like sex—there’s only one first time when you hear yourself on the radio, something that you don’t expect to have happen. It just lit me up, and I’ve been lit up ever since.”

  “Jim realized that Estelle had her finger on the pulse of what was going on,” says Steve, and Don Nix adds, “They started listening to her after that. And she started having a little bit more say.”

  “When we put that record out,” says Estelle, “it exploded like nothing had exploded before. I sold two thousand one by one over my counter. They certified a million, it was a national hit, and I’ve never been as proud of a record in my life.”

  While much good came from the success of “Last Night,” it also marked a certain loss of innocence, the recording business emerging from the recording sessions. First was the issue of authorship and its rewards; then, who would reap the glory on the road. The authorship question was tied to the publishing royalties, a long-term issue; the glory was short-term; both were financial. The money from a hit goes to the songwriters (collected by their publishing companies) and, if the artist has a good contract, they share in some of the royalties on uses of their master recording. Many artists never see a dime after they get the union pay for the session, and that’s the case with the Mar-Keys; those who played that day got paid, and most never saw another cent from record sales. But the songwriters continue to be paid—for every record sold, for every use licensed, for every new version recorded—and after being certified for a million, it has continued to sell, and to this day is licensed for movies, TV shows, commercials, games, and has been covered by other artists. Each of those usages is money for the songwriters. Saxman Floyd Newman is adamant that the authors of “Last Night” were solely him and Gilbert Caple. “We were just messing around and that’s the way a lot of hits come up,” says Floyd. “Two people wrote ‘Last Night.’ Gilbert and I.”

  When the record came out, there were three names on it in addition to Gilbert’s and Floyd’s. The piano part is essential to the song, and it came from Smoochy Smith; his name is on it. Moman, as the song’s producer, brought the piano riff to the horn riff, fashioning one song from many pieces; that’s part of the producer’s job, but his name’s on it as a writer. The final name is Packy Axton. Packy didn’t solo, didn’t really contribute anything essential; his name is there because his mother could put it there, because she saw others carving their piece from the publishing, knew that other label owners who couldn’t hum a tune had affixed their names to songs—and so she put her son’s name on it. (“I couldn’t even spell publishing then,” says Wayne, “much less have asked to be included in it.”)

  Gilbert and Floyd weren’t around when the credits were being divvied on their song, and they might not have gotten anything but for the virtue of an unexpected someone: the cranky Everett Axton. He spoke up for the artists. “He called us outside,” Floyd explains, “said, ‘I want you to know that you gonna get your money, and nobody gonna beat you outta your money.’” He was mostly right: “Instead of Gilbert and I getting fifty percent each, we get twenty percent,” says Floyd. “A lot of money’s been made off that song, and I’m glad Everett Axton spoke up, ’cause we were gonna wind up with nothin’.”

  Bright lights beckoned, or dim lights did, and smoky rooms smelling of stale beer. The band went on the road to promote the new song. Or a version of the band. That is, not the band that recorded it, but the band that smoked in the Messick High School dungeon, that played for sailors at Neil’s, that helped Jim test the wiring in Brunswick, tore out the seats in the Capitol. It was approaching the summer of 1961, and most of the boys revved their engines and spun their wheels waiting for their drummer Terry Johnson to finish twelfth grade and be dismissed for summer break. Then they’d hit the road. The label sent Carla out with the boys, and Miss Axton to chaperone, in a late-model Chevrolet Greenbrier that she signed for, and on which the boys paid the note.

  “We were very young and life was magical, especially because we were playing music,” says Wayne. “No one ever said, ‘You’re gonna take that trumpet and make a living with it.’ My band director, all the people in Arkansas—nobody. They said, ‘How you gonna plow with that thing, boy?’ We never expected to get off the dirt farm, and it was magic when it happened.”

  The communal ideal of the Mar-Keys with Carla and Miz Axton soon collapsed; traveling with eight teenage boys was not an environment for ladies of any age or type—well, except for one type. After the first run of dates, the Mar-Keys slowed the van and the women jumped out near home. With no chaperone and no Carla, it was, Steve laughs, “like letting a bunch of monkeys out of the cage.”

  But this was no picnic at the zoo. The band that went on the road—the white guys—didn’t include the two black guys who’d cowritten the hit. “‘Last Night’ became a hit record and Jim didn’t send me and Gilbert,” says Floyd. “He sent all the white group out on the road, a bunch of kids. And I never thought that was fair, not at all, because Gilbert and I was a part of that group, but we were black. They had been out there for quite a while before we found out.” There is truth in what Floyd charges, though there was also a benefit in sitting out this tour: He was finishing college, training to be a band teacher, and as exciting as the variety of stages would have been, he’d have been one furious and frustrated college guy as he watched the Mar-Keys squander, in an alcoholic frenzy, most every opportunity presented them.

  “You had eight guys between the ages of eighteen and twenty who just wanted to get out on the road to play and party their butts off,” says drummer Terry Johnson. “And that’s e
xactly what we did and that’s probably why the band was a one-hit wonder. It’s hard to be a two-hit wonder when you leave the Dick Clark show and he’s waving at you on film and everybody’s shooting him the bird. It’s hard to be more than a one-hit wonder when you’ve got a tour of Texas booked and the whole band takes off to Mexico and then calls back and says, ‘We’ve lost our bus because we sold it.’ We wanted to have fun, chase women, drink beer. We did it the storybook way and to hell with the consequences. ‘Let’s have this memory burning in our brains when we’re sitting in the old folks’ home, incontinent.’”

  They played it for all it was worth, working the road and pushing the record up the charts. “We played on top of the popcorn stand at the Sunset Drive-In in West Memphis,” says Wayne, and his smile is so big that it almost reaches back in time. The roof was slanted backward; Packy set his bottle down, and as it started sliding back, he chased it, tumbling off the roof onto the gravel below. The bottle didn’t break, nor did Packy, but he refused to return to a place so inhospitable to bottles. “We played the New Moon Club in Newport, Arkansas, where they had chicken wire around the bandstand,” Wayne continues. “We didn’t know whether it was to keep the musicians from getting in the crowd or the crowd from throwing bottles at us. If they had told us to play in the sewer, we would have crawled down in there and played. We were making money, for God’s sake! I was eighteen when all that happened. I had been working at the Big Star grocery store in West Memphis making eighteen dollars a week and tips. And I had a paper route too. I made as much in a night onstage as I made in a week at the grocery store.”