They’d show up at black clubs and the owners would be very skeptical that the eight pimply white kids pouring out of the Greenbrier were the ones who could play the record they’d been looking forward to hearing. But when they took the stage, the band earned the audience’s respect. A club didn’t need the precision of a studio band, and these guys were full of passion, hot as fire, and they had the feel. Playing black music for black audiences is where these kids had dreamed of being since they’d heard bands like the Five Royales, Hank Ballard, and Bo Diddley. They’d been motivated by the liberation they heard in the music, the looseness released in a society that was otherwise so constricted. Their motivation was the good times, and if there was any social result, that was accidental. “People who had never known each other, who had never eaten a barbecue together, who had never done the things that typically people do,” says Terry Johnson, “all of a sudden were doing those things.”
Fun as it was, eight guys in a Chevy van was a petri dish for tensions, their personality differences incubating. Before too long, a noble fight was brewing among the Mar-Keys for leadership of the band. “I used to wear white socks, march around in ROTC,” says Duck. “And so did Don Nix. But, you know, we were just rebellious. Steve was a little different. Steve was pretty strict and disciplined and I commend him for that.”
On the one hand, the guys could rib Steve and he could take it. “None of us liked to pack that Greenbrier,” says Don. “But Steve was really good at it. So we’d make a little effort and then say, ‘Gosh Steve, how do you make all this fit?’ And he’d push his way up there and we’d all stand around smoking cigarettes every night while Cropper packed the van.”
On the other hand, Steve could not tolerate the complete lack of discipline that defined Packy. “One night we all got in a bar fight and it was because of Packy,” Duck remembers. “While we was on a break some guy made some insinuations about Packy, and Packy slashed the guy’s tires and this guy pulled out a twenty-two rifle—looked then like a twelve-gauge shotgun—and a fight broke out. Some lady got hit, the owner’s wife—it was just a complete misunderstanding. A drunken brawl is what it was.”
Most galling of all (to Steve), Packy considered himself leader of the band—when Steve had the band long before Packy joined and was obviously the responsible one. Packy cared nothing for responsibility, but he made it known that they’d be nowhere but for his mama, so it was his band. “These guys went crazy on the road,” Steve says. “It was just pure unadulterated madness. So we’d come down through Myrtle Beach and were in Bossier City, Louisiana, playing the Show Bar.” This was a strip joint where the band played behind and above the bar, and a schoolteacher on summer vacation would shimmy herself down to her nipples while the band coaxed the audience toward frenzy. “We had a three-week engagement,” Steve continues, “and somewhere in the second week we went to the bathroom on a break and I looked at Packy and I said, ‘Packy, you got it. I’m gonna turn it over to you.’ I said, ‘I can’t take this anymore, I’m going back to college.’ I caught a bus, headed back to Memphis, and got reenrolled in Memphis State. And I asked Miz Axton for my old job back in the record store, which she gave me.” Steve went home to Packy’s mama.
The success of “Last Night” wrought another change: In September 1961, Satellite changed its name. When the record reached California, another label there named Satellite learned of the Memphis operation, and they sent a wire ordering Memphis to cease, but offering to sell the name for a thousand bucks. “I said, ‘Screw that, I hate that name anyway,’” Jim remembers. “And the next pressing of ‘Last Night’ we changed to Stax. My wife came up with the name, from Stewart-Axton.” Combining the first two letters of Jim’s and Estelle’s last names, “Stax” cleverly conveyed a proprietary sense while evoking the stacks and stacks of records they hoped to make and sell. The label’s emblem was a stack of records in motion.
The Mar-Keys roared on down the road. Since they hadn’t played on their big hit, the studio didn’t need them around for their next release, or their next several. Fumbling around some no-name town, they entered a record store and saw they had a new single on the market. “The second one sure as hell couldn’t have been us because we were gone the whole time!” says Terry. “But Floyd Newman and those guys, they put a nice one together.”
When neither “The Morning After” nor “About Noon” got the same response as “Last Night,” the theme was retired. The band, however, forged on, running on gas, running on fumes, then finally running empty. “The Mar-Keys died in St. Paul, Minnesota, on a cold fall morning when eight guys looked at each other and said, ‘It’s over,’” says Terry. “And then it looked like rats leaving a sinking ship.”
“Last Night” had, essentially, walked in off the street. “We were surrounded by talent after we moved onto McLemore,” says Estelle. “The neighborhood had become a black area. In our little hometown [Middleton], I doubt there was half a dozen black people in the whole area. When I taught school, we didn’t have integration then, and not much at the bank. At the studio, we just looked at people as talent, not the color of their skin.”
A dozen singles were released in the six months after “Last Night,” and another one that walked in the front door also hit the charts. Stewart and Moman had regular players they could call on, and sessions were mix and match depending on availability. When the Mar-Keys were home for a break, some of them were called to help William Bell record an unusual tune, “You Don’t Miss Your Water (Till Your Well Runs Dry).” It was a country music ballad that had been baptized in a black church feel. (Later it would be covered by soul great Otis Redding and country-rock pioneers the Byrds.) William was one of the kids who’d been dancing on the sidewalk when Estelle hung speakers by the front door. He’d been singing with the Phineas Newborn Sr. Orchestra, one of Memphis’s premier club bands and a training ground for many future stars. In 1960, the orchestra lucked into a six-week club date in New York City, and when it was extended to three months, Bell, homesick, became aware of what he’d taken for granted in Memphis. Using the metaphor of a foolhardy lover, the twenty-one-year-old wrote about his pining. The following year, he was making plans for a medical career—like his father wanted—when he encountered Moman, who’d been impressed by Bell in the clubs; Moman invited him to audition at Stax. “I had been to Stax to sing backing vocals on ‘Gee Whiz,’” William says. “And I knew Estelle because she had the record shop. And I knew Chips Moman. So I was comfortable in that atmosphere.” Under Moman’s direction, Bell imbued the song with longing, and it has remained evergreen, a song through which you can hear life whispering urgently: Appreciate the fleeting moment, it is a gift.
Before the music business took hold of him, William Bell intended to be a doctor.
The song came out in November 1961 with Atlantic’s muscle pushing it; everything Stax released now had a shot. It got just enough attention to be lingering in January after the rush of Christmas records. Its sound was new and nostalgic, cloaked with a melancholy appropriate for winter. “Starting in January, it just skyrocketed,” says William. “The first city that it hit in was Baton Rouge and then New Orleans and Pensacola.” Atlantic had the reach to build city upon city, and it did. “I think Jim thought it was a little bit too churchy,” he continues, “and he wanted the up-tempo stuff that he had been selling.” It hit Billboard’s Hot 100 in late April. Jim had released it because Moman and Estelle pushed him; with the sales building, Jim came around.
Success, as it does, brought bubbling tensions to the surface. Expenses had gone up with the new location, and they’d been operating on a tight budget. Estelle counted on Packy for help before he went on the road. “I was depending on my son to open up while I was at the bank. He’d finished high school, didn’t want to go to college.” Giving Packy the responsibility of the keys, Estelle knew, meant accepting a responsibility herself: “Usually I’d have to call him from the bank to get him up to go open the doors.”
Two thin
gs about that situation grated on Jim. “Nepotism always bothered me,” he says. “But Packy, there was no question—Packy was not an organizational man. You can’t put people in positions if they can’t do the job. Packy would show up one week and the next week he’s gone. He was not reliable, and he didn’t want that responsibility either. But my sister always tried to give him the responsibility. She wanted him to be head of the studio. That would lead, in my opinion, to total destruction.”
“Mother was fighting for something that was never to be,” says Doris, Packy’s sister. “But that’s what parents do. He was so talented, but he didn’t have that management sensibility.”
Jim’s business couldn’t survive on shenanigans. “She brought her family into the thing, and that clouded her perspective,” he says. “She thought I was just a cold bastard. But it was nothing personal. I was looking out for Stax Records. If it’s good for Stax, it’s good for her, it’s good for me, it’s good for everybody that works there.” And what was good for Jim was to give Chips more responsibility. “When we moved to McLemore, Moman and I were very close,” he says. “Chips was my right-hand man. I was still working at the bank, Chips would open the studio, take care of whatever we needed.” But there was a problem. “My sister didn’t get along with him at all.”
By late 1961, her record shop had become successful enough, and demanding enough, for Estelle to quit her job at the bank. “At one point, the doctor put me in bed for three days, nothing but nerves,” says Estelle. She’d been juggling two careers and home life. “I had two kids in school, was leaving home about six thirty in the morning to get to work on the bus. Leave there at four thirty, get to College and McLemore at about five, stay till nine o’clock. When I came home from that, I had to get clothes together for the kids to go to school, do what I had to do in the way of housework—and it got the best of me. There wasn’t a minute for anything extra. Doctor said to me, ‘You’re going to have to get rid of one thing or another,’ so that’s when I left the bank.”
When her Stax hours increased, so did the tension with Moman. Chips and Estelle were from different worlds. Estelle had a vision, and a practical sense for actualizing that vision. She’d proven her mettle at the bank, and she was set on proving it again in the music business. Chips also had a vision, but his approach to achieving it was unlike anything Estelle could comprehend; his nickname, after all, came from his poker playing. (“Chips would rather go to a two-dollar card game,” says Duck, “than produce a million-selling record.”) Estelle remembers Chips living beyond his means: “Chips loved to drive fancy cars. He’d have them financed, then he’d run to keep from paying notes. You could always tell when they was after him.” Further, Estelle didn’t like Chips’s friends. He was someone who liked a drink, and in this beatnik era, she suspected his friends might be into other, more criminal recreations: “I’d be kind of upset at the characters that were coming in and out of there in the daytime. Jim and I talked about the drug scene, which was just opening up. If the law caught ’em, it’d be the end of our place. And we didn’t want to have the name that we were harboring drug addicts.”
When Jim would arrive after work, he’d find himself in the middle. “I would get the flack when I walked in the door,” says Jim. He speaks of Chips with respect and admiration, though they too were very different: Chips was a gambler, Jim was a conservative banker. Chips played electric guitar with an ear for rock and roll, Jim played the country fiddle. Chips was headstrong—working under Jim for Jim’s company.
By early 1962, the fighting came to a head. Chips had recorded an instrumental, “Burnt Biscuits,” an exchange between a popping organ and a harmonica, that he thought was every bit as good as “Last Night” and better than the other Mar-Keys singles that had followed. He named the band after the car he was driving, the Triumphs, and just like he’d hoped, it was gaining traction in Memphis and a couple other cities as well. The single inaugurated Stax’s first subsidiary label, christened Volt Records. (A subsidiary allowed a successful label to spread out; in the wake of the 1950s payola scandal, radio stations were careful not to show favoritism and avoided playing too many songs by one label, no matter how good those songs might be. Subsidiaries allowed for a pretense of fairness: Chess Records formed Checker; Atlantic had Atco. Stax established Volt.)
Chips believed “Burnt Biscuits” had been a hit, but the payment he got from Jim didn’t reflect that. Chips told Estelle that Jim was beating him out of his money. “I knew better because I had seen the sales on it,” says Estelle, “so he and I got into it. Chips told Jim that I was trying to run the business, and Jim jumped on me. I told Jim, ‘I defended you. Chips accused you of stealing his money on “Burnt Biscuits.”’ That didn’t sit too well with Jim.”
Moman had proved himself a strong engineer and producer, and as reassuring as that was, it was also something of a threat. Jim wanted to be a producer too, not an executive. “I could see Chips taking over,” Estelle says, “and I didn’t want that taken out of Jim’s hands.” Jim knew he couldn’t handle the studio while working at the bank, and despite the successes (mostly recorded under Chips’s hand), the company was far from strong enough to support him and his family. Jim needed help. And there seemed to be a new solution: Since returning from the Mar-Keys road band, Steve Cropper was proving himself reliable, resourceful, and friendly. Steve was a quick study, absorbing technique from both Jim and Chips. He was the support that Jim needed, both less threatening and more dependable. So when Chips got hot about the money from “Burnt Biscuits,” Jim felt safe in letting Chips go.
“I was supposed to get a third of the Satellite label,” is how Chips recalls the setup. He’d turned the label from schmaltz to popular music, and he’d been the force behind several of their biggest hits. “We had two or three records goin’ at the same time. It started getting to be a madhouse. And I wrote one side of Carla Thomas’s ‘Gee Whiz,’ and I wrote one side of ‘Last Night.’ And so I asked Jim about my money, and he said, ‘Well, the only thing I can tell you, Chips, is I’m fucking you out of it.’”
Wayne Jackson was sitting in the lobby when what he describes as “the explosion” occurred. “Jim and Chips came into that hallway in a snit. They were at each other. Jim just put his hands on his hips and said, ‘Well if I screwed you, you’ll have to prove it.’ And Chips said, ‘Well, okay then,’ and he slammed out the doors, got in his TR3, and purred on off down the street.”
“I hated to see him go,” says Jim, “but I was in the middle. I ran the company with an iron hand, and I had to. I had to.”
A new calm followed. Jim no longer had to play referee between Chips and Estelle. Steve moved into Chips’s place in the studio. Packy was finally doing something he was good at—leading the besotted Mar-Keys, with plenty of miles between him and Jim. And Chips acquitted himself quite well, though he had to pull himself up from the mire. He got a lawyer who got him a $3,000 settlement. “I was a broke kid,” says Chips. “A thousand of it went to a lawyer. [Leaving Stax] is a bad memory. It affected me all the way through.” It did, however, let him know he wanted to be in charge. After a year in Nashville, Chips opened his own studio across Memphis, American, and became a huge hitmaker through the 1960s and ’70s, responsible for some of Elvis Presley’s best-known and respected work, as well as hits with Neil Diamond, Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield, and Waylon Jennings—among many others. Working for himself, everything he touched turned to gold.
Steve picked up the daytime responsibilities, as much as college allowed, until something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be music. “I wound up marking tapes and sweeping the floor, cleaning the piano and doing whatever I could do,” he says. “I didn’t mind calling the musicians or going to their house and waking them up. And I turned in the contracts, edited tapes, and did all of the little odd jobs that nobody else wanted.”
“With Steve,” says Estelle, “Jim didn’t have nearly the headaches that he had before.” Nor did he have the e
xperienced assistant he’d had before, the hitmaker. Jim had cut “Gee Whiz,” and now he’d have to prove that that wasn’t a fluke.
6. “Green Onions”
1962
Booker T. Jones, with the successful Carla Thomas session under his belt, was making his presence more known at Stax. He was no longer another neighborhood kid bugging Steve Cropper and the other clerks to play him records; he was a player in the pool of musicians who helped Stax create sessions. He’d moved from sax to keyboards. “We were always having to call somebody to come in and play piano,” says Steve. Marvell Thomas was attending college; Joe Hall, popular at Hi Records, was great except for his drinking problem; Smoochy Smith was on the road. When Jim said he wanted a reliable keyboard player, Steve turned to Floyd Newman, the baritone sax player; he suggested Booker. Floyd knew the kid was as good on one instrument as another, and moving him from horn helped Floyd protect his own gig. The youngster took up the keyboard duties, usually playing the piano but exploring the possibilities of the studio’s Hammond M3 organ.
A friendship was developing between Booker and Steve, and it expressed itself not only in their playing; they began to hang out together, telling an interviewer in the 1970s:
“I’d pick Booker up at school,” says Steve.
“Baritone sax in the backseat,” Booker affirms.
“You had marching band,” says Steve. “I’d wait out there on you.”
Nineteen-year-old Steve had a car, seventeen-year-old Booker didn’t, and giving Booker a ride one day to his girlfriend’s, a song came on the radio and the seed for Stax’s next hit was planted. “There was one bar in there where they did this one little thing,” Booker remembers. He turned to Steve. Cropper nodded. He’d heard it. “The song never did come back on the radio again,” Booker continues. (Neither he nor Cropper was ever aware of the song’s name.) But next time they were in the studio, they “took those few notes,” says Booker, “and started messing around.” It wasn’t so much a song they came up with as a pattern, a series of riffs that hung together. Then they parked it on the back shelf of their minds.
Respect Yourself Page 8
