Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  “Otis Redding was an incredible artist,” continues Ashford. “And I liked Rufus Thomas; he knew how to do what he was doing. But I wasn’t too much aware of the other artists. Carla was a nice singer. But the Stax sound was more earthy than ours. The Motown rhythm section were all jazz musicians, so instead of playing a B-flat chord, we’d have a B flat with a flat five on it, and get a different sound. But not to the point where it confused the public. Our sound was more pop.”

  “Motown was a big deal for us,” says Jesse Jackson, noting the roads that it paved. “We could never own our own talent. And here comes Berry Gordy, producing and writing and distributing and owning his own company.” Like the car manufacturers that surrounded him, Gordy conceived a reliable product, shiny and universally appealing, on which to build a national—nay, international—empire. Stax had no such vision. It was careening from session to session, stumbling onto hits, unaware of the larger effect it was creating. In Detroit, they built cars; in Memphis, the big factory with the good jobs made tires. The scope of vision was different.

  The sign at Motown read, HITSVILLE USA. The marquee at Stax answered, SOULSVILLE USA. “That whole Memphis-soul feeling—outside of the southern nightclubs, nobody had ever heard that laid-back, barely-make-it-to-the-next-measure bluesy soul feel,” says Mar-Key Terry Johnson. “It was different from Motown with the strings and the background voices and trying to pop up black music so white people would buy it. What came out of Stax was really not a very commercial music. It’s amazing the commercial success it had.”

  Motown songs made you want to sing along. Stax music—you were the singer. “Motown had appeal to the urban areas of the North and they had a lot of pop crossover,” says future Stax star Isaac Hayes. “Stax was down-to-earth, raw, very honest music that represented the common man—the common black man. It was real-life experiences on a very ethnic level. Stax was just a music of the people.”

  “It wasn’t a preconceived kind of goal or concept that I had that Stax would be a black-music-oriented record company” says Jim. “As I got more and more into the music, I began to understand and have a feeling for it. I got into it by chance, but it was becoming a labor of love.”

  7. Walk Right In

  1962–1963

  The little studio hummed along. Estelle would open the record shop and Steve the studio. Customers entering the old theater doors could be coming in to buy a song or to make one. Buying one was easy, and making one not much more complicated. Steve would audition the talent and, if it seemed like something was there, he’d have the room ready when the band would fall by. “People were always coming by the record shop and saying, ‘Could you hear me sing?’” says Steve, “‘Could you hear me play? Would you listen to my song?’ And usually during the week there were sessions going on.” By the time Booker showed up after school, Lewie and Al were there. They might have a radio ad to knock out, a job sent by a local ad agency; a producer or musician might rent the studio, sometimes bringing his own staff, sometimes hiring the band and engineer. If Steve had heard something good, there’d be fresh tape on the machine and a nervous kid—or adult—from the neighborhood, pacing about. If no one had a seed from which a song might grow, they’d gather around the turntable in Estelle’s shop, let her play them the most exciting singles she’d recently found, and then parse the trends and melodies, finding something to build on. There was forward motion, but no overarching direction.

  In August of ’62, they got stroked a little. A record promotions man named Joe Galkin, based in Atlanta and a fan of Estelle’s shop and Jim’s studio, booked a session for an up-and-coming act. Talent coming all the way from Georgia! Galkin was familiar with the studio because Memphis was part of his territory. Promo men worked as hired guns for national labels, making sure that in specific regions (like the South) their records reached the front lines of the disc jockeys and retailers. Joe watched Stax grow, and was impressed by the players. “Joe was promoting records for Atlantic,” says Estelle. “That’s how he came in the picture. We’d talk about records since I had the shop. He recognized the product we were putting out was very successful.” Joe had watched a regional guitarist, Johnny Jenkins from Macon, build a following with his local instrumental release “Love Twist,” and when it kept on selling, he brought it to Atlantic, which gave it national distribution. Sales were strong enough to warrant a follow-up, and Galkin hoped to marry the success of the “Green Onions” sound with Jenkins’s flashy guitar.

  On Sunday, August 12, 1962, the group now calling themselves the MG’s was out front beneath Estelle’s record-store speaker. The temperature was pushing ninety but not breaking it—a relatively mild summer day, though hot and thick enough to remind Memphians of their city’s proximity to a swamp. Air conditioners were still not common, and the studio had no windows, so waiting out front was not just hospitable, it was also a relief. “We’re all out there,” says Steve, “and here comes this car, Georgia plates on it. We go, ‘Well, that’s gotta be them.’” “Them” was two people, a star and a driver. Johnny Jenkins was tall and slender, fashionably cool and laid-back. The driver, an African-American, set to work. “This big, tall guy gets out of the driver’s seat,” Steve continues, “goes around to the trunk, and he starts pulling out amplifiers and microphones and guitars, like he was setting up for a gig.” Steve told the driver that, this being a recording studio, they had their own equipment inside and, in fact, it was already set up.

  “I remember them pulling up,” says Booker. “I remember the driver being the guy that carried the stuff—the food and the clothes—for Johnny’s demo session.”

  Johnny’s demo session—how quickly the excitement faded. Jenkins was a showman, a guitarist who danced, did acrobatics, put the guitar behind his head and played solos. His live show was all fire, and when people left, they wanted a reminder of the fun, which they could get by purchasing “Love Twist.” But creating a new record that would draw people to the show—that proved harder. His showmanship and the MG’s groove couldn’t find a place to synchronize, the session never hit its lick, and it was ending in disappointment. The players had gigs, disbursing to play “Stardust,” “Roll with Me Annie,” and “Apple Blossom Time” to good citizens sipping highballs and swishing across the dance floor. Hits or misses in the studio notwithstanding, these guys put food on their tables by playing in clubs.

  Johnny Jenkins, left-handed guitarist, 1963, dancing the “Love Twist.”

  “During the session, Al Jackson says to me, ‘The big tall guy that was driving Johnny, he’s been bugging me to death, wanting me to hear him sing,’” Steve remembers. “Al said, ‘Would you take some time and get this guy off of my back and listen to him?’ And I said, ‘After the session I’ll try to do it,’ and then I just forgot about it.”

  “He had really sat over there all day long,” says Al, “and he kept talking about, ‘I can sing.’”

  The guy had made no impression on Jim during the course of the day (the session was scheduled around Jim’s bank duties). But Joe Galkin, who was sitting in the control room with Jim, had heard him sing as part of Jenkins’s club act, and he was hoping to leave the session with a twofer—two records for the price of one. Now that Johnny hadn’t jelled, he was in danger of leaving the session with nothing. “Joe and I had a great relationship,” Jim continues. “He’d scream at me and I’d scream at him. We were great friends.” The vocalist was badgering the band, and Galkin was working Jim. Almost too late—some of the guys were packing up for their night gigs—Galkin played his trump card. He’d give Jim half of the publishing royalties in return for half of Stax’s royalties on sales of what they cut. The publishing was worth more: It would begin paying with the first sale, and would pay on others’ versions should they be recorded, while the master royalties wouldn’t pay until the expenses had been recouped, and applied only to this version. “Everybody was tired and a couple of the musicians had already left,” Jim continues. “It was like, ‘Well, we gotta do
this. The guy’s been sitting here waiting all day, let’s see what he sounds like.’”

  Steve called the guy down to the piano. He asked Steve to play some “church chords.” “‘Church chords,’” says Steve, “meaning triplets. And we started playing and he started singing ‘These Arms of Mine’ and I know my hair lifted about three inches and I couldn’t believe this guy’s voice.” Steve ran outside to wrangle the departing musicians. “Lewie Steinberg was putting his bass in the trunk of his Cadillac,” says Steve, “and I said, ‘Lewie, get your bass out, man. I need you real quick.’ Al Jackson was there and Johnny Jenkins wound up playing guitar since he was already plugged up. So we cut ‘These Arms of Mine.’”

  “When you’re in a moment like that, you’re not thinking that it’s gonna sell a lot of records,” says Booker T. Jones. “It’s all heart, and time gets frozen. I’d never been with anybody that had that much desire to express emotion. ‘These Arms of Mine,’ it’s the longing. And it translates to the listener and the player and anyone who hears it. When that happens, millions of people listen. There’s no choice.”

  “He was a very humble person,” says Estelle. “I don’t think he had any inkling we’d even pay attention to what he did. But we were always analyzing people for their uniqueness, and he was definitely different from anyone else we had. He had that different sound. But we didn’t think he’d bust it all wide open.”

  The driver’s name was Otis Redding.

  Nobody at Stax knew at the time that Otis had already recorded two singles, one in California, the other in Georgia, nor that he was a featured attraction in Johnny Jenkins’s band. Or that he earned $1.25 an hour as a water-well driller, and was fired from his job as a hospital orderly for singing in the hallway. That day, to those people, he was Jenkins’s valet. (Another fact not then known about Otis was that he was under contract to an enterprising producer and former used-car salesman in his hometown. That did not stymie Galkin. He snowed the snowman, tough-talking him that Otis wasn’t twenty-one when he signed—despite the fact that, when recording at Stax, he was still a month shy of his twenty-first birthday.)

  By Thursday the sixteenth, Stax had Otis under contract, assigning him to the Volt subsidiary label. While some were excited by the new signing, Jim felt more a sense of obligation than exuberance; as far as he was concerned, the deal was really about Joe Galkin, not Otis Redding. “The black radio stations were getting out of that black country sound,” he says. “We put it out to appease and please Joe.” When the single came out, three months had passed and it was bundled with two other releases, one by Carla Thomas (“I’ll Bring It Home to You,” an answer record to Sam Cooke’s recently released “Bring It on Home to Me”) and another by the Mar-Keys (their version of Cannonball Adderley’s “Sack O’Woe”). These releases had the contemporary sound and feel, not Otis’s. His A-side was “Hey Hey Baby,” which sounded like a Little Richard imitation; “These Arms,” spare and “country” sounding, was buried on the back.

  The world seemed to agree with Jim Stewart—Little Richard was the best Little Richard, and Otis’s record was going nowhere. A couple more months passed, and then the influential Nashville DJ John R., no doubt influenced by Galkin, flipped over the record. John R. broadcast on WLAC, one of the first stations to adopt “clear-channel” technology, meaning that at night its fifty thousand watts reached twenty-eight states. The station’s influence increased as radios proliferated, especially with the introduction of the transistor radio in late 1954. John R. broadcast when kids were going to bed, their radios tucked up under their covers. On his show After Hours, he serenaded them—America’s future songwriters—with hepcat talk and very un-lullaby-like rhythm and blues. John R. called to tell Jim he was promoting the wrong side and that the ballad was a smash. As pleased as Jim was to hear it, he was looking at months of little response. Figuring that something was worth more than nothing, Jim passed to John R. his portion of the publishing monies he’d gotten from Galkin. (The Federal Communications Commission would soon curtail such practices.) The gift had potential value; if John R. made it a hit, he’d get half a 1963 penny for every record that was sold. This, Jim had learned, was how records got played.

  John R. set about playing the record every night of his show.

  At Stax, it was a period of comings and goings. Two weeks after Otis came through and weeks before “These Arms of Mine” was released, Booker T. Jones—namesake for Stax’s biggest act, rising star of the house band, and recent high school graduate—left Memphis altogether to attend Indiana University, four hundred miles away. He’d been saving since folding newspapers outside Phineas Newborn’s house. With $900, he had enough for out-of-state tuition, and off he went. “I never thought, What am I doing going to college?” he says. “Lots of other people did. But it meant everything to my family for me to have a degree. My father was a high school teacher. He had a degree. His father had graduated from Mississippi Industrial College in the late 1800s and was able to purchase seventy acres of land in Marshall County, Mississippi, on which he built a school and became a teacher.”

  As Booker settled into his freshman year, “Green Onions” was climbing to number three on the pop charts, overtaking Elvis Presley’s “She’s Not You.” But Booker didn’t give it a second thought. “Indiana changed my life. The standards they have—I don’t think I had any respect for regimen before I went there. And I was finally learning about all this music I was hearing in my head and playing—what it meant and how it translated and how to translate it to other people. How to write strings, how to write horns, what were the origins of this scale, how to conduct an orchestra—I found these things out at Indiana. I always heard music in my mind but I didn’t have the ability to translate so much of that music to the outside world.”

  Though Indiana had an applied music degree, Booker pursued a broader education, studying business, art, and history. “Music gives you a way to organize not only notes, but all sorts of ideas. You think of twelve notes in the scale, and twelve colors in the spectrum, twelve months in the year, and twelve bars in blues. That’s Western music, but what about Eastern music? What if you have sixteen bars, or thirteen? Thirteen is the magic number if you use it in conjunction with eight and five. And that’s the golden ratio.” He smiles. “There are so many possibilities to link music with mathematics and beauty, with nature and art.” He soon received a $5,000 check from Stax for “Green Onions,” paying his upcoming tuition, and making a down payment on a Ford Galaxie 500 convertible. “I was styling. I went back to Memphis as often as I could and played sessions.”

  No one fully appreciated the space that this quiet musician filled until he was gone. “Booker wanted to continue with his education,” says Steve. “How can you deny a guy that?” The studio knew they’d need a piano player, and saxophonist Floyd Newman, once again, was the linchpin: He brought Steve to his gig, at a South Memphis nightclub, to check out his keyboardist. “I heard a couple sets,” Steve says, “and I talked to the guy, asked if he’d be willing to do some sessions at Stax. And he says, ‘Oh, man, that would be great.’ So I told Jim, ‘I think I found us a piano player.’”

  The young man’s name was Isaac Lee Hayes. He was working days at a meatpacking plant (“Hogs and cows being slaughtered,” Hayes says, “I couldn’t hardly sleep, but it was a living”), and he’d already been rejected by Stax twice, first auditioning with a blues band, then with a rock group. “Nobody would hire Isaac,” says Floyd. “Isaac used to hang around the studio and he would hear things that were beyond his knowledge. He was just a natural, but he wasn’t a very advanced player. When I hired Isaac, he could only play piano with one hand.” He’d since learned a thing or two, and Jim called Floyd to see if he’d endorse the idea. “I said yes,” Floyd remembers, “because you could drop a fork or spoon or plate on the floor, and Isaac would tell you what note it was. He was hearing everything.”

  Isaac’s budding talent found fertile ground at Stax. He’d had no forma
l training on the keyboards—“I feel so limited, so restricted,” he says even years after he’d become a superstar. “It’s in my head, but I can’t get it to my hands.” But he was innately musical, with a strong sense of a song’s arrangement: He knew when to play, and when not to play. That endeared him to the musicians in the studio.

  Isaac Hayes, songwriter. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  His first session was for one of Otis Redding’s early returns to Stax, after “These Arms” had hit but before Otis was anything like a star. “I was nervous,” says Isaac. “I was scared to death—they were gonna find me out, that I’m not good as Booker T. Jones. Well, Otis was a dynamic person. He was easy to work with. It was like a party whenever Otis came to town. We’d gather around the piano, work up the tune—the horn players, Al Jackson, Steve Cropper, David Porter did a lot of the backup singing—and I sat at the piano. After a few takes I just fell in line and it was like a big family.”

  The family was growing. The woman who would develop and run the company’s publicity department, Deanie Parker, came through the door with her high school singing group that won first prize in a local contest: a chance to audition for Jim Stewart. “Mr. Stewart indicated that he was impressed,” says the petite chanteuse who’d moved to Memphis from Ohio a couple years earlier, “and then he asked a question that I had never heard before: ‘Do you have any original music?’” Deanie returned to her bedroom, dominated by an upright piano, and wrote lyrics, a melody, and taught the group. “And Jim was even more impressed. And then he said, ‘What are you gonna put on the B-side?’” She laughs, “‘B-side? What is a B-side?’” Her song “My Imaginary Guy” came out in February 1963 (with her “Until You Return” on the flip), as Otis’s “These Arms” was finding its audience. A playful song, it reaches back to the fifties for a mambo beat, with rich backing vocals; it also calls to mind Carla’s “Gee Whiz,” with its dreamy, youthful melody. It makes you reach for your ink pen and school notebook to doodle.