Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Usually, sessions seemed to materialize without forethought. A musician from the neighborhood wandered back to show Steve a cool riff; Steve picked up the guitar. An aspiring songwriter appeared, ready to demo the next great tune . . . there was always something to do, and often something to play for Jim in the evenings. Records were released: Jim’s DJ friend Nick Charles, from one of the pop stations, recorded a couple insipid pop songs, the direction Jim pursued before hearing Ray Charles. Another artist, Macy Skipper, told jokes with a raunchy groove behind him; while his “Goofin’ Off” is a lot of fun, it didn’t aid much in keeping the operation solvent.

  In the summer of 1962, a vocalist named Billy Lee Riley was scheduled for a session. Success always circled Riley but never quite landed upon him. In the 1950s, he cut some notable records with Sam Phillips during Sun’s heyday, but circumstances never conspired to make him a star. With fellow Sun alumnus Roland Janes, he formed Rita Records in 1960. Their little Memphis label had a huge success in 1961 with Harold Dorman’s “Mountain of Love,” which almost broke the top twenty nationwide, and nearly broke their company (they assumed a debt to keep up with demand, then had to endure a long wait for distributors to pay). In a few years, Riley would be one of the coolest guys in Los Angeles, leading the house band at the Sunset Strip’s Whisky a Go Go. On the day he was due at Stax, however, he was picking up small change as the vocalist for a radio jingle.

  Or he was due in to lead a session, either at the studio’s behest or of his own initiation. The facts are unclear. Al Jackson Jr., Booker T. Jones, and Lewie Steinberg remember Riley as a “country and western” guy. He didn’t fit musically because he didn’t fit personally either. He was coming off the boppin’ fifties, a hyped-up feel, and the groove at Stax was much cooler, a later-at-night feel, hep on its way to hip. Steve remembers Riley not showing up; Estelle recalls him there, but with a problem. “He got drunk,” she says. “Showed up but was so drunk he couldn’t do the commercial.”

  “We worked a few hours with Billy Lee,” says Jim, “and nothing was happening. We took a break and got ready to start again, and we were looking for Billy. We couldn’t find him. He just took off.”

  Booker remembers Jim not identifying with what Riley was doing. “Jim was sitting up there in the control room,” Booker says, “making all kinds of funny faces. And finally the cat left, walked out on the street and didn’t come back.”

  This is where the different versions fold back into one: The band was left in the studio without a vocalist. “We’re standing around looking at each other,” says Booker. “We didn’t want to waste time—Sunday afternoon.” Sunday—when Jim wasn’t at the bank.

  The four guys on the floor all knew each other musically, but this was the first time they’d played together as a quartet. It may have been Al Jackson’s first day inside Stax. He was considered the best drummer in town, and getting him on a session was an accomplishment. “Al wasn’t anxious to get in there at all,” says Booker, who’d played alongside him in Willie Mitchell’s and Bowlegs Miller’s groups; Booker brought Al to Stax. “Al had his hands full with those two bands. And his dad had a band. Al was hard to get.” Howard Grimes had been the first-call drummer, playing on Carla’s earlier hits; Al Jackson was Howard’s mentor. Lewie Steinberg played with Al in the clubs, and he’d been in and out of the studio a few times since he’d played on “Last Night.” He had a funky feel, walking and rolling his bottom notes. But the four were not an obvious band. Al and Lewie were each approaching thirty; Cropper, the only white guy, was twenty; Booker was a teen. But they’d all been listening to the same music for several years, so finding a groove together was no problem. Booker shared a slow blues jam he’d been doing at dances. The others fell in. “I had been playing that in the clubs,” he says, “and people liked it and would slow-dance to it.”

  Jim, in the control room, recorded one of their takes. “Jim said, ‘Hey guys, come in here and listen to this,’” Steve remembers. “And we go, ‘You recorded that?’”

  “I was up in the record shop,” says Estelle of that Sunday. “That was the only time I had to work on my books, to keep up with the inventory and all that. [Commerce closed for church in Memphis—and in much of the USA—then.] Jim came running up front, said, ‘Come back here, I want you to hear something. It’s a hit!’” Estelle agreed with Jim’s assessment; it captured that late-night slow-dance feel when hands began to wander, and she suggested “Behave Yourself” as a title. Then, disbelief mingling with enthusiasm, the band heard Jim, who’d been leery of releasing both “Last Night” and “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” present the new problem: They needed a song for the other side of the single. “We just kind of looked dumbfounded,” Steve remembers, “and wondered if he was really serious.” They’d come in to record a jingle, now talk was of a single.

  Talk turned to that recent afternoon and what they’d heard in the car. “I started playing that riff,” says Booker. “I had played it a few times on piano but this was the first time on the organ. It sounded different through the little organ speaker. It had more urgency, more attitude.” The band quickly fell into an arrangement of the song. Steve was playing a Fender Esquire guitar, favored among country musicians (it’s the distinctive sound on Johnny Cash’s hits); he was playing it through a Harvard amp. Booker’s organ was filtered through the African-American church. The song’s charge came from an honesty that underlaid it, the meeting of styles anticipating a racial reality on the streets that many people preferred to deny. Al Jackson suggested the song’s dynamic build. Jim suggested Steve move his punctuating chords from the song’s middle to the front.

  “Booker goes down to the organ and starts playing,” says Steve, “and Al Jackson and Lewie fell in on it. And I think two cuts later, we had what we know today to be ‘Green Onions.’” The instrumental had its own sound, while suggesting several references: It was sinister, with a staccato emphasis on the beat like the popular TV detective show theme song “Peter Gunn.” (“We were fascinated by ‘Peter Gunn,’” Lewie remembers. The Henry Mancini song had recently won a Grammy.) “Green Onions” also evokes the deceptive simplicity of a John Lee Hooker song, and the beat-heavy “Think” by the Five Royales, a popular R&B band who were a big influence on the Mar-Keys. The guitar and bass often double, playing the same notes, guided by Booker’s left hand; it gives the band a fat sound, uncomplicated.

  “They come up with this fantastic groove,” says Jim, “a funky, unbelievable groove. Everybody came into the control room and was jumping up and down.” Lewie listened to the playback and said the music was so stinky it should be called “Onions.” Someone else suggested “Funky Onions”—“We wanted to be funky and stinky,” says Lewie. “Miz Axton changed it to ‘Green Onions.’ So, that was that.”

  Now that there was a record, the group needed a name. Chips Moman had named his band after his car—the Triumphs. The competing British sports car was the MG—named for Morris Garages (the dealer who customized the British Morris sports cars). There was no denying the rhythm inherent in combining “MG’s” with “Booker T.,” and there was a certain mystery in the initials—Memphis Group, Mixed Group. Whatever it meant, Booker T. & the MG’s worked.

  Booker T. and the MG’s, 1962. L–R: Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr., Lewie Steinberg. (Promotional photo by API Photographers/Earlie Biles Collection)

  Promptly, Jim had Steve take the tape to Scotty Moore at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records, where they had a lathe, and Scotty cut an acetate of the single—a cheap but playable version of the record. Within hours, not more than a day, that acetate and a popular local DJ, Reuben “Mad Lad” Washington, found each other; either he came into Estelle’s shop and heard it playing or Steve brought it to him at WLOK—but the DJ put it on the air. “Behave Yourself” was the featured side, but Washington liked the flip. “Before that record was over,” Steve remembers, “the phones were ringing off the wall. ‘Who is that?’ ‘What band is that?’ ‘Where’s t
hat from?’” Calls came in to Estelle at the record shop, and she phoned Jim at work, and he authorized pressing the records. Al Jackson recalls Jim first offering it to Atlantic. “They said, ‘Where’s the rest of it? This needs horns,’” says Al. “Jim said, ‘Naw, I’m going on this record.’” Jim, after all, had wanted his own label so he could release songs the way he liked.

  Disc jockeys loved the record, but they were not featuring “Behave Yourself,” playing the B-side instead. “‘Green Onions’ broke overnight,” says Jim. “We couldn’t even get the records out fast enough.” In Memphis it got airtime on WLOK, where Al Bell and Dick “Cane” Cole added it to their shows. WDIA, the leading black station in town, took to it. Steve drove to stations in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama, promoting the record. “The neat thing about it,” Steve says, “was that they were glad to see anybody. Nobody ever called on a lot of these outlying stations. They thought, These guys drove all the way from Memphis, sure, we’ll play your record.” Worries about the gap left by Moman, who’d been instrumental in the earliest hits, were eased; Jim’s confidence in his own abilities was renewed.

  As radio play, fans, and sales grew like spring weeds, “Green Onions” got Wexler’s attention in New York. He suggested reissuing it with “Green Onions” on the A-side, and moving it from the new subsidiary label, Volt, to Stax; he thought Stax’s association with the earlier hits would help draw DJs. He was right. Pushed by Atlantic, the song went to number-one R&B and number three on the pop charts.

  Stax was releasing a variety of material, but after “Green Onions,” a core sound coalesced. The preceding three singles indicated a lack of direction: “The Pop-Eye Stroll” by the Mar-Keys is a light, humorous instrumental, followed by Nick Charles’s “The Three Dogwoods,” a sappy Christian allegory, and then the Canes’ “Why Should I Suffer with the Blues,” a nightclub ballad salacious enough to make Mr. Charles’s dogwood wither. “I think ‘Green Onions’ was the beginning of the Memphis funk sound,” says Booker. “This attitude of making it as funky as it can be, as simple as it can be, and let’s do it together—let’s understand each other. I think ‘Green Onions’ was the beginning of that part of the Memphis sound.”

  More than creating a hit single, the musicians that day created a unit. A studio doesn’t need a house band, but when one can offer a versatile backing group, the studio can attract a lot of vocalists. A ready group saves time in assembling a session, and if the players are in sync, the time becomes more productive. A house band can become a studio’s lifeblood. “Before Al Jackson, we did not have a unit,” says Jim. “We had Steve, and different guys that we used on a regular basis.” They’d connected with each other, they’d connected with Jim—they’d established a level of communication that transcended race and age. “That’s what made Stax,” says Lewie. “We integrated Stax and didn’t think no more about it than the man on the moon. We couldn’t go and play on the same bandstand together in Memphis! But we’d get together inside the studio and do everything we want to.”

  Outside this oasis, the city had some catching up to do: At nearly the same time that “Green Onions” was recorded, thirteen black first graders had integrated four white schools, prompting some white parents to remove their kids. “We’ll move out into the county,” one mother told the newspaper, “and if they [African-Americans] go to school there, we’ll move back to Mississippi.” Change comes slowly to Memphis. The sanitation workers had begun believing it wouldn’t come at all. With the city making no real progress, over nine hundred men signed Teamsters Union cards—the Teamsters represented sanitation workers in Tennessee’s other major cities—and hundreds had shown up at a mass rally asking for tubs that didn’t leak maggots onto their heads, showers to get clean after work, a bathroom they could use at their headquarters instead of the sewer, and other common decencies. This was the largest ever public statement by the garbagemen and their power was approaching critical mass when Mayor Loeb called the Teamster leaders to a meeting. What was said was said in secret, but following that, the Teamsters—apparently having been threatened—abandoned the sanitation workers. They cut off contact with O.Z. Evers, the men’s representative, who stated, “I think the union has sold the men down the river.” He quit the project in hopeless disgust, but a younger man, T.O. Jones (no relation to Booker T.), took up the lead. T.O. Jones, after serving in the navy, had worked the shipyards in Oakland, California, and there had experienced the benefits of union work, the power of one voice amplified by many. Jones returned home to Memphis in 1958 and began hauling garbage the following year. He took over the organizing efforts and found solidarity at the Retail Clerk’s Union, where he was given office space and telephones to pursue his cause. The sanitation workers were asking for respect and they were determined to get it.

  1961. Sanitation workers asked for buckets that didn’t leak maggots on their heads, among other requests for respect. (University of Memphis Libraries/Special Collections)

  “If you think about it,” Booker mused about creating a mixed-race band, “you’d be stupid to start something like that in 1962 in Memphis.” Starting it had not been a conscious decision, but continuing it was. “In those days in Memphis, there were some terribly inhuman acts that happened. The emotion was very extreme in the South and in this country—it was out of control. If we’d thought about it, there’d be no way the band could work.” Memphis was their common home, but within its borders they lived in separate cities. Life for blacks there was very different from life for whites.

  Race was not the only issue in the studio. Another was money. Al Jackson was glad to have the song work out, but he was making a living in the clubs and had no interest in giving that up for a series of fifteen-dollar demo sessions, of which only a few might pan out to the union’s full sixty-five-dollar scale. Thanks, but no thanks. Jim, however, had seen how strong Al’s contributions were—not just his playing but also his ear for arranging. Jim decided the gamble was worth it; Steve was on staff, Lewie was amenable to the present situation, Booker was still a kid but anxious to play any sessions that didn’t conflict with high school or ROTC, so if Jim put Al on some minor salary, he’d save time pulling sessions together and get better results from a group that knew each other’s styles. So Booker T. & the MG’s became the house band at Stax.

  As “Green Onions” spread, the MG’s began to travel; mixing races on the bandstand was not forbidden everywhere. “We got to go to all the big cities,” says Steve. “St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Chicago, Washington, DC, New York, Atlanta, and we’d get to see what these people were dancing to.” Each city had its own sound; radio stations were programmed locally, and understanding who liked what was essential information in figuring out how to break records. (Philadelphia liked doo-wop; Atlanta had a gritty edge; Houston and Dallas needed a twang.) “Al Jackson was the guy that would pick up on the rhythm of what people were doing,” Steve continues, “and first thing Monday morning, we’d be working on the grooves that we saw happening. So we were demographically staying on top of things.”

  Traveling as a racially mixed group was not without its challenges. They were sometimes refused hotel accommodations, gas station bathrooms, and restaurant service. At a truck stop in Alabama, when the four were told to go outside to the rear window to place their order, they left instead; Duck lingered (this occurred after he joined the group), and went back in alone. He ordered forty hamburgers, staying at the counter to see them go on the grill, to see the buns laid out and dressed, and even the bags come out to hold the order. But when the counter help looked up to deliver the food and settle the bill, Duck had vanished, the MG’s on their way to a place where they could all dine together.

  The gigs were mostly confined to weekends, because the band was in the studio during the week. With their coming together, Stax had a foundation. “Al Jackson had come into the picture,” says Jim, “and we concentrated on some real serious production work, on tightening. We had a few hits prior
to ’62, but that was the year we started the Stax sound.”

  While Stax was establishing itself as a new source for contemporary R&B hits with pop potential, there was another company in Detroit well down that path. Berry Gordy had established Motown in 1959, and he’d turned early success into a hit factory. Coming from his job applying chrome and upholstery at a Lincoln-Mercury assembly plant, Gordy applied the assembly-line technique to music—a real contrast to the organic group think at Stax. He built a departmentalized company that could handle all aspects of the record business: songwriting, production, mastering, distribution; Motown even had a staff choreographer, and their deportment specialist trained its artists in manners and etiquette. (No souse, hoop cheese, and grape bellywashers for them.)

  “We were a factory,” says Motown staff musician Jack Ashford, known as “the tambourine man.” “We had an assembly-line-type procedure. The A&R department would okay the song, then the producer would put it up for review. Once he had his players, the musicians would cut the track. Then, if the music was found good enough, it would go out to the lyricists. At Motown we [the musicians] very seldom saw the vocalist. They recorded later, and several artists would record [using the same backing track], and whoever sang it best is the one that ended up being released.”

  Motown’s songs were manufactured for pop success. They were bright and inviting, emphasizing the backbeat with a tambourine. The call-and-response of gospel was adopted, eschewing the grittiness of the form, creating an opening for audience participation. Motown’s music was full of appeal, easily digestible. It worked under the slogan “The Sound of Young America,” defining itself not by race but by age. Though its artists were black, its music was not necessarily categorized so. The company was calculating, shrewd, and austere. Its first hit, written by Gordy, was “Money (That’s What I Want),” and that’s what they were getting. The Motown party was fun to attend, but the swinging good times stopped at the dance floor, replaced in the studio by dictatorial edicts, autocracy, and repression.