Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  9. Soul Men

  1963–1966

  Stax’s ongoing success was a boon to all associated with the label, but perhaps most to Atlantic. Creating the songs was much harder than feeding them through the distribution machine, and Stax’s creativity was on fire. So in the summer of 1964, when Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun found themselves propelled to wild dancing by two singers in a Miami nightclub, they immediately thought of pairing the duo with Stax.

  The two men—Sam Moore and Dave Prater, the rafter-shaking singers who would become famous as Sam and Dave—did not know each other when they began performing together. The success of their first duet, as impromptu and unplanned as a high-wire fall, revealed that each had an innate understanding of how the other would move, physically and vocally.

  Sam Moore had scuffled his way into hosting a talent show at a nightclub, the King of Hearts, in his hometown of Miami. Dave Prater was a bread baker. Sam remembers that when Dave signed up for that week’s show, he was wearing his baker’s whites; wherever he walked, he left behind white flour shoe prints. At the auditions, Dave sang a Jackie Wilson song, “Doggin’ Around,” but realized he didn’t know the verses. Sam, whose job depended on selecting acts that would produce a good show, agreed to stay close during the performance and feed him the lines. But that night, Sam’s foot caught the microphone cable, and as the mike began to fall, Dave went down to catch it and Sam went down to catch Dave. Choreographers couldn’t have written it better: They came up together, singing and with the mike in hand. In that little mix-up, an act was born that would last the better part of twenty-two years and would remain forever a part of the public consciousness.

  Both were high-energy performers, and their force mushroomed when they were together. Unlike many partner acts—the Righteous Brothers, the Simms Twins, the Everlys—Sam and Dave weren’t known for subtle harmonies, one voice buttressing the other. They were double dynamite, each at full tilt, exploding together with exponential force. Roulette Records had been unable to capture the live magic in the studio, and Jerry Wexler flew to Miami with partner Ahmet Ertegun to see them at the King of Hearts.

  “I’d always heard about Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, and Ahmet,” says Sam of Atlantic’s triumvirate. “I had always wanted to be on Atlantic, to get produced by those ears.”

  “It’s a hundred and ten degrees inside this club,” says Wexler. “Ahmet and I are boogalooing our asses off in there, and we signed Sam and Dave.” Sam moved to New York, and when Wexler summoned him, Sam was ecstatic. Like Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, this soul crooner imagined crossover potential. Then, from behind his desk at Sixty-first and Broadway, Wexler conveyed the news: You’re being shipped to Memphis.

  Memphis? That’s country music, thought Sam. His eyes were on the city that never sleeps, recording like Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, and Ray Charles—the Atlantic Records dream team! Memphis? The southern poll tax, enacted after the Civil War to prevent blacks from voting, had only recently been constitutionally abolished. Southern blacks had marched on Washington in massive numbers calling for jobs and freedom the previous year, around the same time that four smiling Sunday-school girls had been slaughtered in a Birmingham church bombing. He’d just arrived in New York and he was being shipped off to the land where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, three Freedom Riders, had been delivered to the Ku Klux Klan for murder by local police. The assassination of Medgar Evers was recent. James Meredith had recently become the first African-American graduate of the University of Mississippi, but it had taken five hundred US Marshals to get him there. Sam remembers his muted reaction: “God have mercy.”

  The social conflicts may have obscured Sam’s knowledge of the music coming from Memphis, but Wexler was tuned in. “I didn’t have enough production chops available to do Sam and Dave right,” Wexler acknowledges. “So I said to Jim Stewart, ‘How about you go ahead? The contract is with us, but we will treat this exactly as a Stax record in terms of royalty and so on.’” Wexler was proposing a “loan” to Stax, an unusual arrangement with a few important caveats—most notably that Stax agree to split publishing royalties on any songs written by Stax staff for Sam and Dave, and that Atlantic retain ownership of the duo’s contract. “The deal was that they made the Sam and Dave masters at Stax, they did the mixes, send them up to us, and from there on we took it,” explains Wexler. While the lawyers were drafting that contract, someone at Atlantic—either Wexler or the lawyers—realized that the distribution arrangement between Atlantic and Stax that had been in place since Rufus and Carla’s 1960 hit had grown into a significant arrangement worth a lot of money, and it had never been formalized. So the contract discussions ensued, encompassing now not only a unique arrangement with Sam and Dave, but also the basics of the relationship between the two companies. For Jim Stewart, their arrangement was less about the company and more the man he dealt with—Wexler—so he requested a “key-man clause,” making Stax’s connection to Atlantic dependent upon Wexler’s presence there. The distribution deal took longer to work out than the Sam and Dave arrangement, but because it was only affirming a deal long in place, no one hesitated to continue business as usual.

  Once in the hinterlands of Memphis, Sam and Dave stood outside the theater with Jim Stewart, getting acquainted. Sam remembers he was acclimating to the idea of being in an old theater within a languishing retail district, taking it all in, when a colorful neighborhood character in a pink shirt, chartreuse pants, white belt, white shoes, pink socks, and bald head stopped his afternoon stroll in front of Jim Stewart. Jim introduced Sam and Dave to the songwriter and piano player Isaac Hayes. Along came another guy in a small hat and a large alpaca sweater, looking like the insurance salesman he was—David Porter, another writer for the studio.

  “Then I find out that during the daytime Jim works at the bank and at night he plays country music,” Moore continues. “Oh my God, the tears started streaming down my face. I looked at Dave and I said, ‘How could Atlantic do this to us? How could they?’”

  Oh, but for a crystal ball: Then Sam Moore could believe what Jerry Wexler was doing for him. Mr. Chartreuse and Mr. Alpaca were going to custom-fit the voice of Sam and Dave, writing the hits and coaching the singers so closely that, for a period of time, the four individuals were a single voice. The hits that were to come, the reputation for their stage act, the enduring legacy—all were unseen but in place.

  The pairing of Hayes and Porter as a creative team further tightened the weave at Stax. Isaac had replaced Booker T. Jones during the school year, and when Jones was home, Isaac supplemented the band; he and Booker could trade off piano and organ. He’d also begun to write arrangements and help produce sessions, learning his art on the job. “I saw how Otis was working with the horns and doing the head arranging—nothing is written down. And during those days, there was no multitrack tapes—we had one track, and Jim Stewart was known as King of the One Track. If somebody screwed up, everybody had to start all over again.”

  David Porter was a regular at Stax long before he was hired there as the first staff writer. Since the late fifties when he was in high school, he’d been singing in clubs as Little David. When the record store opened in the concession stand, David was quickly inside, eager to be associated in any way with anything musical in his neighborhood. He met Estelle Axton, then Jim Stewart and Chips Moman; when he found out they had a recording studio in the back, he auditioned, essentially, near where the popcorn machine had been. Porter’s eagerness and intensity were charming, and if the owners didn’t think he yet had the chops as a vocalist, he certainly won their favor when, hearing they needed a baritone sax for the first Rufus and Carla session, he introduced them to Booker T. Jones.

  Estelle Axton thought David Porter had talent. She appreciated his drive and encouraged him. Fatherless, he’d been raised in government housing not far from Stax, singing at Rose Hill Baptist Church in a quartet with future Earth, Wind & Fire vocalist Maurice White. He wanted to write and sing, s
o when stars like Jerry Butler came through Memphis, he’d insist they let him carry their bags; in return, he’d seek advice. (Butler advised him: “You can have a hit record, but you better learn how to diversify.”) Still a teen, Porter borrowed $500 from a local preacher to start Genie Records, and released himself singing “Ain’t That a Lot of Love,” a fine song written by Deanie Parker and future Stax employee Homer Banks. (The song made little impression at the time, though by the mid-1960s, after a few copies had made their way to England, the heavy staccato opening and soaring melody morphed into the Spencer Davis Group hit “Gimme Some Lovin’.”)

  Soon after the studio opened, with an eye toward keeping himself nearby, David took a job sacking groceries at the Big D Supermarket across the street. The scene at Stax—it was less a scene than another world—was especially appealing to Porter. At his grocery store job, his supervisor made a habit of kicking black employees from behind as they walked past, an everyday humiliation that the others accepted. Porter was younger, and of a generation not afraid to demand respect. The athletic high school graduate grabbed the kicking foot, pressed his supervisor against the wall, and stated his opinion of the man’s practice, with a prediction about what would happen next time he tried it. The produce manager no longer kicked the produce man in the ass. The distance between that grocery store and the Stax family could be measured in inches, though the chasm would take years for the public to traverse.

  When not on the market’s clock, Porter returned to Stax’s embrace. He brought lyrics that spilled over several pages, and Estelle played him Motown songs to help him decipher the structure of verses, chorus, and bridge. (“David would have a good idea,” she says. “But he’d expand upon it so much that he’d have two or three songs in one. I had to teach him how to cut out the junk.”) She played him writing teams like Bacharach-David and Holland-Dozier-Holland, helped him hear the writer in the production, hear the personal stamp.

  In 1962, Porter recorded—as Little David—for the local label Golden Eagle and then for Savoy, and also as Kenny Cain for Hi Records; if the records had little impact, Porter’s enthusiasm and ambition were undiminished. Nor was he slowed by becoming a teen father, marrying the woman and adding “insurance salesman” to his responsibilities so he could provide a home.

  David picked up gigs as a vocalist with Booker T. & the MG’s. When they’d go out on weekends—weekdays they stayed in the studio—they’d flesh out their set with soulful covers of contemporary hits, sung by Porter. Estelle pressed Jim to audition David as a vocalist. Jim didn’t share her faith, but the value of her taste had long been proven, so he dutifully listened. Stax released Porter’s first single as a vocalist in January of 1965. He was twenty-four years old and the father of two, working at the grocery, selling insurance, and traveling with the MG’s. That’s busty, it’s no wonder that his song title was “Can’t See You When I Want To.”

  “David and I went to rival high schools and we sang in rival groups,” says Isaac Hayes, reflecting upon their partnership’s genesis. “I had known David, but not that well.” Hayes’s stock at Stax had been on the rise. His talent for arranging the instruments was increasingly respected. “I always had ideas but I was the last resort. If they’d get stumped on a session, then they’d say, ‘What you got, Ike?’ I’d offer them my little ideas and they started to work, and before you knew it I was arranging a lot.”

  David Porter (left) and Isaac Hayes, songwriters. (Promotional photo by API Photographers/Deanie Parker Collection)

  David had no shortage of song ideas, but he needed a musical partner to fully realize them. He and Steve Cropper collaborated on what became the first single for Sam and Dave, but Porter had yet to find the yin to his yang.

  “David approached me with the intention of selling me an insurance policy,” remembers Isaac, who was finding himself cowriting with the MG’s, individually and as a group. (“Banana Juice” by the Mar-Keys is evidence of the fun Isaac was having.) “During our conversation, we discovered that we had similar interests. He said, ‘Ike, I’m a lyric man, and you’re a music man, let’s do like Holland-Dozier and Bacharach and David!’” Porter was working with Raymond Moore, a high school friend who wrote poetry, and they brought in Hayes to help finish the song “How Do You Quit (Someone You Love),” which Carla Thomas recorded. Hayes and Porter felt like something might click, and they persisted. “After fifteen or twenty duds we began to find our niche,” Isaac says. “We experimented a lot. That’s why we had so much success for Sam and Dave, because I would try new types of melodies and new horn riffs and different sounds.”

  Sam and Dave did not initially find Stax a welcoming environment. “I don’t think Jim ever laughed,” says Sam Moore. “It was always business: Get in there and do your job. We’d take a break and when it’s time to go back, he would come through and say, ‘Gentlemen, are we ready?’ That was it. I felt no warmth from him towards Sam and Dave.”

  But Hayes and Porter were feeding them fire. “Sam and Dave didn’t have a style,” Sam reflects. “Isaac Hayes gave us a style.” Isaac Hayes was someone who could sit at the piano and put a song together, pointing to each person and playing their part, then standing in the middle of the room to coach everyone together. He was producing and didn’t know it, and he produced Sam and Dave right onto the hit charts. “When we first started, there was just a verse, chorus, and then try and harmonize it out. Isaac Hayes, bless his heart, he gave me and Dave the style, all the call-and-response, the horns became the background singers, the rhythm keeping the beat—it’s Isaac Hayes.”

  For Sam and Dave, it began to come together a few months later with “I Take What I Want,” written by Hayes and Porter, along with a sixteen-year-old guitarist named Mabon “Teenie” Hodges. Hodges was a rising star in Willie Mitchell’s band, and when he protested that he knew nothing about writing songs, Teenie remembers them saying, “All you’ve got to do is play like you play onstage. Just do it your own way. You do it all the time.” The experience unlocked a door inside him, and he’d go on to write several huge hits for Al Green, Bonnie Raitt, and others.

  “David had this old Ford, and you could tell where we’d been because we’d leave a trail of seat-cushion foam,” Isaac laughs. “It’d fall out the bottom of his car. And we rode in that car for—it seemed like forever. We’d walk down the street, they’d see us with attaché cases, and they’d tease us. ‘Hey hitmakers, how many hits y’all write today?’ But we just kept trudging on, relentlessly, and finally we struck it. And then everybody wanted to be a songwriter.”

  “I Take What I Want” didn’t sell well enough to land on the charts, but it gave Hayes and Porter the material they needed to begin honing Sam and Dave into the breakout act they were about to become.

  In Memphis, Stax existed largely in a vacuum. Outside the black community, it was largely unknown, because most whites simply never acknowledged the black community, ghettoized mostly to the north and south of downtown. Similarly, the sanitation workers were invisible men, keeping the city clean, seen but rarely acknowledged. T.O. Jones, however, was relentless in seeking the formal acknowledgment of the city for the sanitation workers, despite being shut out seemingly everywhere he turned. The recognition he sought was for fair treatment on the job, respect as human beings, and for the same opportunities that whites were offered—all of which could come through workers united in a union. Jones made contact with AFSCME—the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—and at a November 1964 meeting attended by sanitation workers, supported by leaders from the black community and churches (no longer afraid of offending the mayor they’d helped elect), a charter was adopted for the Local 1733—the “33” in honor of the men fired the previous year. Jones was elected president. Pete Sisson, the commissioner they’d supported, responded by firing the five, though, from the department who’d been elected as the new union’s officers. The city was clearly stating it would recognize no union for these black men.

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sp; A couple months later—long enough to suggest the adoption of the union was not compelling him—Sisson began getting his thirteen hundred “unclassified” workers onto the Social Security rolls. These were the employees on the trucks who were subject to whimsical firing and labor abuse, and Social Security had been one of their requests. Sisson also standardized the department’s pay scale, and on some trucks he added heat. The workers remained “unclassified,” and when in the swelter of August 1966 Commissioner Sisson received word that a strike might be imminent, he sent letters to seven hundred former workers announcing available jobs should the sanitation employees strike; he would fire en masse those on strike and hire those ready to take the abuse.

  The unionized men—about five hundred of them—met on Saturday night, August 21, 1966. Jones informed them that the city was not going to recognize Local 1733 as their bargaining agent, it was not going to proffer a written contract to the men, and it would not agree to better working conditions. The men voted to strike, but the following day, after a special session of the City Commission, a chancellor issued an injunction ordering the municipal workers not to strike, saying the action would “cause an emergency condition . . . greatly affecting the health, safety and general welfare of the people of the City of Memphis.” Though some men showed up to picket in the wee hours of Monday morning, a defeated T.O. Jones told them the city had outmaneuvered them. Public Works again, after a time, made further concessions; it introduced three-wheeled carts to replace the leaky tubs men carried on their heads, it gave the men rain gear, open trucks were replaced with mechanical packers, and the men received a ten-cent-an-hour raise.