Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Deanie hit the road with her musical ensemble—and the road hit right back. “These artists were leaving their homes to go on the road,” she explains, “where they did not have hotels where they could rest, did not have restaurants where they could eat. At any given time, a sheriff might appear out of a cotton field and stop you just for the sport of stopping you, tell you that you were speeding when you know that you were driving under the speed limit. As an African-American, you knew that any excuse and no excuse was good enough to be stopped, and humiliated, or treated as a second-class citizen. I didn’t have the soulfulness of Aretha Franklin, I could never belt out a song like Gladys Knight, and I certainly didn’t have Tina Turner’s legs. So, I thought I needed to find something else to do.”

  Deanie pursued her college education and found a part-time job. “Estelle Axton hired me to be a salesperson at the Satellite Record Shop. And she asked me for recommendations for other salespeople, so my popularity soared.” Others, too, were taken by her spunk and charm. “Jim Stewart made me the first publicist for Stax Records, even though I had no experience. We contracted the services of Al Abrams, who had done marketing, PR, and publicity for Motown. He really, by mail and by phone, taught me how to structure a press release, how to pursue the media, how to prepare the artist for the interview—fundamental things.” In 1964, Deanie Parker would become the company’s first salaried African-American office employee.

  In the fall of 1963, Stax released a record that would rival the success of “Green Onions.” Since giving the company its first hit, Rufus Thomas was proving himself an endless source of song and fun. He followed “The Dog” from earlier in the year with a sequel that was promptly covered by the Rolling Stones on their debut album and has been often imitated, but never equaled.

  There was a certain happenstance to the recording of the song, extending from Jerry Wexler’s New York restiveness. He’d been expecting a new song from Carla Thomas for several weeks, and every time he’d phone Jim, Jim reported that the equipment was broken. Wexler turned to Tom Dowd, trained as a nuclear physicist and working as Atlantic Records’ chief engineer. “Jerry was thinking they were up to something down there so he called me in, said, ‘Dowd, you’re going to Memphis tonight.’ He said, ‘There’s no equipment in life that’s gonna be broken for two weeks, so find out what are they doing.’ Okay, fine. Jim Stewart picked me up at the airport on a Friday evening, took me right to the studio, and I saw there was a brake band broken, a few normal malfunctions on a machine. Jim said, ‘We can’t find the parts.’ So I called my engineer in New York, said, ‘You bust into Harvey Radio first thing in the morning, get me a pair of brake bands for a 350, get me a couple 65K resistors, get me two capacitors, an on-off switch, and then go straight to the airport, give a stewardess on the first plane to Memphis twenty-five dollars to carry them, and I’ll meet her.’

  Rufus Thomas in Estelle’s Satellite Record Shop, early 1960s. (Photograph by Don Nix/Courtesy of the Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture, Steve Todoroff Collection)

  “Next morning I asked Jim to take me to the airport to pick up the parts. I think he was a little taken aback. But we returned to the studio, I plugged in a soldering iron, boom boom boom, had the machine running in about thirty-five or forty minutes, said, ‘Okay, we’re ready to record.’” Dowd couldn’t get a flight out until late Sunday afternoon, and arrangements were made to play golf on Sunday morning with some of the guys. Dowd was about to confirm yet again that Memphis is the town where nothing ever happens, but the impossible always does. “We played ten or eleven holes and all of a sudden Steve says, ‘Well, we’d better be heading back to the studio, we just about have time to get coffee and doughnuts.’ And I was surprised because it was Sunday. Well, on Sunday when people come out of church, they fall by the studio. Al Jackson shows up and Isaac [Hayes] and David [Porter] and the horns mosey in. We’re talking and they were asking me questions and playing me things. Then Rufus Thomas comes walking in the door and says, ‘Hi everybody!’ He says, ‘Everything workin’?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, it’s working now.’ And Rufus says, ‘I got a song!’ So Rufus runs this song by them once or twice, and I’m up in the control room to engineer and I’m laughing. Steve looks up and says, ‘You ready to record?’ And I say, ‘You got it, let’s go!’ Boom, right? Rufus never broke stride. He sang it for the band twice, says, ‘See y’all later!’ and he walked back out the door, going home to have Sunday dinner. It was very casual.” The Stax folk listened to the playback and were in awe of Dowd’s work. Through experience and science, he knew how to capture the most life and make it stick to the tape. Jim said it was the best-sounding record yet to come off their console. Dowd continues, “It was pleasant people enjoying each other’s company and having good conversation. And I had under my arm when I went back to New York, I had ‘Walking the Dog.’”

  For Dowd, Stax had been a walk through the looking glass. In New York, sessions were by the union book, with the clock ticking off three hours and the pressure always on. Sessions proceeded in proscribed ways: Music was put on charts by the arranger, which the musicians played according to the instructions of the producer. Certain people worked in the control room, others on the studio floor, and they communicated on microphones through the glass, with neither invading the other’s space. Not in Memphis. It was a revelation to see the free passage between the control room and the studio floor. Everyone was welcome everywhere. It was a fluid environment, even with the song arrangements. No musician’s parts were written, nothing was worked out in advance. For “Walking the Dog,” Rufus hummed his ideas to the players, they improvised. He dictated the rhythm by getting close to the player’s ear and clacking his teeth. It worked. The song is extra funky, a tight, bouncing stroll down a young and sunny street. Steve’s guitar leads the parade, loose like a rubber band. Every bend he ever played, he made his own. Packy’s saxophone grins its way through a verse. (“Packy was not the greatest saxophone player in the world,” says Duck, “but he had the heart of the greatest saxophone player in the world.”) Musical charts would have been less useful than racing charts. “Head charts,” they called this—making it up and using the good parts.

  Packy Axton, left, and Don Nix. (Photograph by Don Nix/Courtesy of the Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture, Steve Todoroff Collection)

  In New York, Wexler was more amazed by the process than the song—and he loved the song; soon he’d visit Memphis to produce there himself. “Memphis was a real departure,” he told author Peter Guralnick, “because Memphis was a return to head arrangements, to the set rhythm section, away from the arranger. It was a reversion to the symbiosis between the producer and the rhythm section. It was really something new.”

  It was also really something old. The studio maintained a mono machine and a mono sensibility well past the advent of stereo, when two tracks of playback enhanced the sound’s dimension. Not a company to lead the technological charge, Stax captured what the others couldn’t—spirit. Jim had no reason to argue with what was working. But Tom Dowd did. “When I came down here, 1962, I was appalled. These people were still recording on a machine like I abandoned in 1952. And when I said, ‘We should replace this machine with a new two-track machine,’ it was an appalling suggestion. They thought their sound was gonna be destroyed if they went into this.”

  Dowd was motivated by more than technology. Albums manufactured in stereo sold for a higher price, garnering more profits. It would be the summer of 1965 before he connected a stereo machine to the front of the mono machine, allowing Stax to work, as was their custom, in mono, but simultaneously producing a stereo tape. “I said, ‘You just listen on the one speaker in mono and whenever you send me a tape, send it to me off of this stereo machine. You make it sound good in mono, I’ll worry about the stereo.’” Stax got comfortable with stereo, and in 1966, Dowd would install a four-track recorder. More tracks expanded the possibilities for overdubbing and mixing. For the players, more tracks meant that when one person m
essed up, not everyone had to redo their parts. More peak performances could be kept.

  Stax was becoming a company of national renown, but in its South Memphis neighborhood, it was the rising home team for which everyone root-root-rooted. For those African-Americans who had recently ascended to the middle-class neighborhood, Stax was a validation. Neighbors could insert themselves into the success: My record clerk was a recording star, a songwriter, a tastemaker.

  The democracy—the opportunities—of the studio was already legend. Rufus and Carla walked in the front door, danced onto the national charts. High school kids were leading bands—with songs on the national charts. The dang driver from Georgia who walked in carrying amps recorded his own song there—and was rising again and again on the national charts. Still, it was an unreliable way to run a business.

  As the legend spread, more unknowns would enter, expecting to get heard. But with the studio growing, more sessions were going on, leaving less time to cater to the individual potential legends. Since the musicians worked late on weekend nights, the studio was quiet earlier in the day. “We just told people to come back on Saturday morning, and starting about nine until noon or so, I got to hear a lot of stuff,” Steve says. “I don’t recall any superstars coming out of that, but it kept things flowing.” These Saturday-morning auditions became a weekly conduit between the neighborhood and the studio. Sometimes it was a duo, a man playing solemnly at the piano, harmonizing with the woman standing stiffly beside him. Sometimes a lone white guy, strumming country guitar and crooning; or four guys from the street corner harmonizing like pros, in amateurs’ outfits that paid homage to the day’s natty dressers. Most had never seen the inside of a studio before.

  “If you had talent—if you thought you had talent—you could go there,” says Rufus, his racial wariness eased in this sanctuary. “Nobody else was doing that around here. No studios—no nothing—ever gave any of the black artists that kind of a chance.”

  Elsewhere in Memphis, blacks stepped to the curb when whites walked by. The city closed its public swimming pools rather than integrate them. And in June 1963, over one hundred sanitation workers came to a meeting called by organizer T.O. Jones, an effort to solidify the group’s complaints. The city, however, sent informants, and less than two weeks later, thirty-three men who’d attended the meeting—including T.O. Jones—were fired. Jones spent months fighting to get those jobs back, and was mostly successful, though he chose not to return to the daily humiliation and instead devoted himself entirely to forming a union. He soon had reason to be optimistic: The intransigent Mayor Loeb resigned in October after a death in his family, and an African-American community banded together to elect a moderate, Judge William Ingram, who had distinguished himself on the bench as a voice for the common man, publicly rebuking the police force for unlawful tactics. The community also supported a new Public Works commissioner, Pete Sisson, though he turned on them shortly after being sworn in, stating in early January 1964, “I do not expect, nor will I tolerate, agitation within my department. I receive applications daily from too many prospective employees who are ready and willing to go to work immediately to allow discord within the ranks of this department.” When Mayor Ingram did not come to the sanitation men’s rescue, the new optimism quickly dimmed.

  T.O. Jones organized the sanitation workers and fought for union representation. (University of Memphis Libraries/Special Collections)

  At Stax, everyone had a chance. One neighborhood group in their early teens became reliable assistants to the studio regulars (valet was the fancy term used), and as they learned to play, they would soon form their own group, the Bar-Kays. “I used to get my hair cut up there next to Stax when I was a kid,” says James Alexander, who was born in the clinic (925 E. McLemore) across the street from Stax. “Carl Cunningham was the first one who started getting into Stax because he shined Al Jackson’s shoes at the barbershop and he aspired to be a drummer. Al used to let him sneak in and get on the drums. I wanted to get in there too. Al, Isaac and David, Booker T.—they took us under their wing. When there were no sessions, we’d start beating on the instruments and when they saw we wasn’t gonna leave, we became part of the family. Otis Redding, soon Sam and Dave, and all these people, they always needed stuff done—clothes to the cleaners, cars need washing, shoes need shining. We were like little puppies running around in the studio.”

  “The Bar-Kays used to come in there and just sit and listen to us the whole time we’d be recording,” says bassist Lewie Steinberg. “They sat, listened, and learned from us.”

  “We were playing the songs that you hear on the R&B radio stations,” continues future Bar-Kay James Alexander. “We would play Brook Benton. We learned to play the Stax stuff that was getting popular, ‘The Dog’ by Rufus Thomas, things like that. Monkey see, monkey do—wasn’t no such thing at that point as trying to play originals. We would just learn the songs off the radio and play them.”

  They’d gather around the record player in Estelle’s shop to deepen their understanding of the songs. Despite all the studio-centric work that went on in the store, records did get sold. Business got so good that Estelle expanded into her own place, taking the front of the bay next door when the barbershop folded.

  The Bar-Kays came into their own at Booker T. Washington High School, a few years after Booker T. Jones, William Bell, and William Brown graduated from there. Booker T. was the African-American public school on the south side of town (a mile from Stax), and it had a large auditorium. It often hosted major events, one of the largest being a talent show that since the 1940s had been known as the Ballet. It was the premier showcase for up-and-coming talent, rivaling the Palace Theater’s Amateur Night, which in earlier years had sprung Rufus Thomas, B.B. King, Bobby Bland, and many others. “The thing during those days was to get your talent good enough to be on the Ballet,” says James. “We played that night and I’ll never forget it. We got suits from Lansky Brothers on Beale Street, maroon shiny suits, pink shirts, black patent-leather shoes, and we had—you had to have—black silk socks. We had a pretty hot horn section and we always liked to move around onstage. We played ‘Philly Dog’ by the Mar-Keys, and that really brought the house down.”

  These kids paid tribute to the rising national stars who had graced the same stage not long back. The 45s by the recent graduates from Booker T. Washington were in every record collection alongside James Brown, Brook Benton, and Etta James.

  One of Stax’s biggest fans left town in 1963. Local disc jockey Al Bell was offered a job in the Washington, DC, radio market, where his swinging sophistication quickly became popular on drive time, mornings and evenings. “Al Bell would come by the record shop,” remembers Steve Cropper, “and he’d invite us to the station. We got to be friends. I was allowed to bring him and other DJs brand-new product and demos, and if they liked it, they actually put it right out on the air. Didn’t need anyone’s permission, just played it. And the day that Al Bell went to Washington, DC, I lost a buddy. He was such a part of us—he’d hang out at the record shop, helped write songs with us, played our records—and when he left, we lost a big part of the whole thing that Stax was into.”

  Bell made the most of his outsider status, bringing the sounds of southern soul to this North-South border, introducing Otis, the MG’s, Carla, and all the talent from Stax, Fame, Hi, and the myriad of southern labels to a new audience. He would soon use Otis’s 1964 recording “I Want to Thank You,” the flip side of his “Security” single, as his sign-off song. When the sound found favor in DC, DJs elsewhere on the East Coast could justify playing the music.

  No one at the time could know, but Al’s foray on the East Coast would prove propitious in just a few years’ time.

  8. The Golden Glow

  1963–1965

  What very well could have been a fluke—the driver who steered into a hit—was proving to be no accident at all. As if testing disc jockey John R.’s resolve, “These Arms” finally hit the R&B charts on Marc
h 23, 1963, half a year after its release, landing at a solid number twenty—if only for a single week. John R. wasn’t done, however, and neither were other disc jockeys around the country. Two more months passed, and on May 25, “These Arms” hit the pop charts, staying there for three weeks. The gentleness of the song, its emotional depth, its simple yet gripping musicality, were indicative of Otis’s latent talent, which Stax began to extract. “Otis did not catch fire overnight,” Jim says. “Each record was a step above the last one in his interpretations of the music, and his arrangements, and his whole persona onstage. It was a process that took time.”

  “He put a spark under Stax,” says Steve Cropper. “No question about it. And with all due respect to all the great artists that came through those doors, Otis Redding was the one artist that everybody looked forward to recording with.”

  “Otis Redding seemed to be a person with a mission,” muses Booker T. Jones, “and we picked up that mission and it became all of ours. His intent was so strong and so powerful when we were recording that it translated to more than the music.” More than being heard, Otis wanted to be felt. He wanted his recorded performance, his impersonal piece of vinyl, to physically affect the detached listener. He wasn’t able to do that right away; it took time to master the intricacies of recording, of conveying his ideas to the musicians around him, of getting the sounds in his head to stick to the magnetic tape.