Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Around this time, though nothing changed at Stax, everything changed. Without really becoming aware of it, Stax had become an entity to be reckoned with. It was a supplier of hits to Atlantic—relied upon for hits. Atlantic still produced its own material in New York, but the hot stuff on the label came from Memphis, from Stax. Sam and Dave were on the rise, Otis Redding was raging, and the MG’s and Carla and Rufus were each regularly landing on the pop charts. Further, Stax was expanding its sound with new vocal groups: The Mad Lads hit number-eleven R&B with “Don’t Have to Shop Around,” and the Astors hit number twelve with the catchy, post-doo-wop Cropper-Hayes collaboration “Candy.” Even as there were grumblings that Atlantic wasn’t doing enough to promote Stax’s material, Atlantic expanded its reliance on Stax, sending to Memphis an artist they knew was capable of hits but who’d been unable to find his groove.

  Wilson Pickett was a popular singer in New York City nightclubs, but to the rest of the world he was basically a has-been if he was known at all. He’d been singing with a Detroit vocal group named the Falcons, who’d enjoyed a minor hit with “I Found a Love.” The Falcons had three lead vocalists—Pickett, Eddie Floyd, and Bonnie “Mack” Rice. They harmonized beautifully, and they passed around the lead microphone. But Pickett wasn’t prone to share; the spotlight throws a large circle, and he believed he could fill it. Instead of breaking out, though, he was going broke.

  Jerry Wexler at Atlantic saw the stealthlike beauty of Pickett onstage, could hear in his growl the latent soul power, and quickly agreed to make a solo star of the man who looked like he just walked out of Esquire magazine. “Before Black Panthers were a political issue I used to call him the Black Panther,” Wexler says. “It was like he was made out of steel and baling wire, so handsome, and I just loved his voice. When James Brown used to scream, it was a scream. When Pickett screamed, it was a musical note—a great advantage.”

  But so far Pickett was all gas, no fuse. “I was very critical about material,” Pickett says. “Wexler used to bring me a whole suitcase full of records he wanted me to do. Me and him almost had a falling-out because he was bringing too many Rascals records, Rolling Stones, Beatles—these kind of things. I was trying to create an original career of Wilson Pickett.” Pickett had been spending time on the road, playing the radio while the car crawled between distant chitlin-circuit towns, and one voice with the sound he wanted kept coming over those stations. “I was touring through the South and I kept hearing on the radio this guy, Otis Redding”—and Pickett breaks into singing “Pain in My Heart”—“and the horns and everything. So I said, ‘Jerry, this is the direction I want to go.’”

  Wexler produced a single with Pickett in New York that made little impact, and the Panther was pacing. “We could never get together on material—ever,” says Wexler. “So his manager, a little mobbed-up Italian guy that was very nice to me, finally said, ‘Listen, do it or else.’”

  “Jerry said, ‘Okay, baby, I’ll hook you up with it,’” Pickett recounts. “So he hooked me up with the Stax family down in Memphis. And then it was no turning back.”

  “I said, ‘Okay, Jerry, send him down,’” Jim says. “I was really trying to help them out.” So Stax paused in its own work to help Pickett, who wasn’t even on the label. (Jim arranged for the studio to have points in the profits of their collaborations.)

  Jim told Steve about the upcoming project, asking him to prepare some material for consideration. “I said, ‘Who is Wilson Pickett?’” remembers Steve. He tried to buy Pickett’s albums, but there were none. He did find a single or two in the Satellite Record Shop, and there was an album from the Apollo with a variety of Atlantic acts—including Rufus Thomas and Pickett. “Wilson had one track at the end of the album,” Steve says, “and it was maybe four minutes long but for two minutes all he said was, ‘Hey baby, I’m going to get you the midnight hour. I can’t wait until the midnight hour,’ and so that’s all I had to go on.”

  In May 1965, Wexler flew to Memphis ahead of Pickett. He had business to do, a client to ready, a handshake that needed warming: His lawyers had drafted the distribution agreement. And in addition to those business needs, there was a personal need. Wexler wanted to share the recording experience Tom Dowd had talked about: freedom from the three-hour session clock, the excitement of head charts and making up the arrangements on the spot, conviviality and a sense of teamwork for the greater good. Just seeing it done would be touching the hem of the garment.

  On the eleventh, Wexler and Jim (sporting a goatee, now that he was free of the bank) delivered Pickett from the airport to a hotel where Steve was waiting, and the two musicians sipped from a bottle of bourbon and listened first to a handful of singles that Pickett brought—recent releases that he liked. “Cropper got a good idea of which way he wanted to take these things,” says Pickett. Steve adds, “He had this tune that he’d been working on and he played a couple verses for me, and I said, ‘That’s out of sight, so let’s build it around that one.’ And that’s what happened.”

  “We left,” says Wexler, “and the next morning they came in with the song ‘In the Midnight Hour.’” Booker T. was off at school, Isaac Hayes had his day job in a slaughterhouse, so piano that day was Joe Hall. He’d played at the Plantation Inn, and was the original piano player at Hi Records, helping to establish the Bill Black Combo.

  “Steve Cropper and that group of fellows were so together, they knew what each was going to do—break here, or cut there, or leap there,” says Pickett. “There were no music charts. Race didn’t matter. We were wailing away on ‘In the Midnight Hour,’ trying to find the right groove to put that sucker in. Jerry Wexler was in the control room, and was unhappy about something.”

  He was unhappy about the song not having found its groove, though considering that twenty-four hours before there’d been no such song on earth, one could say it was coalescing speedily. But Wexler was not hearing the oomph that he needed, that he could feel nascent in the song. Dowd’s story about participation was fresh in his mind. After giving various suggestions over the intercom, he realized that the issue was with the bass and the rhythm, and that the best way to explain how he was hearing it was to dance to it. “I get this idea about a beat from [the song] ‘The Cool Jerk,’ delaying at two and four. So I go out in the studio and I start dancing—like a fool. I’m sure they couldn’t hide their mirth, you know, this old man doing the Cool Jerk.”

  The embers were smoking, but the song wouldn’t flame. “I had a different guitar part worked out that was the major lick,” says Steve. “And Jerry said, ‘Can you just do a backbeat thing?’ And he’s, like, pulling his arms down, and doing this dance that he’d seen somewhere. He made it go, ‘I’m gonna wait till the midnight hour,’ boom, ‘that’s when . . .’ It was great, and it certainly simplified my part.”

  “In the Midnight Hour” entered the R&B chart on May 26, 1965, at number thirty-five. Over the next six weeks it climbed to number one and spent nearly three months on the chart; it spent about the same time on the Hot 100, reaching number twenty-one. “My experience in Memphis was the first time I’d encountered southern recording,” Wexler continues. “Instead of working from written arrangements, they built the record organically—not deductively. I’d see the MG’s come to work in the morning, hang up their coats, gather up their axes, and start playing music. Maybe it was some chord changes, maybe it was a lick, maybe it was a song, but they started playing, they started building it. I said, My God, this is fantastic.”

  Not only was Wexler’s joy in the creative process revived: He also took care of business. On May 17, 1965, the handshake between Jim and Jerry was formalized as a contract between Stax and Atlantic. The numbers were standard, such as “standard” exists in the record business: Stax would receive fifteen cents for each single sold, and 10 percent of the retail list price on albums, and Stax would be responsible for paying the artists. Jim, not wanting to be stuck in a deal with a bunch of strangers he didn’t trust, had asked
for a key-man clause, and there it was, written amid the thirteen pages of agreement. That seemed like a lot of words for expressing what had worked with none for five years already, but Jim figured Atlantic was a large company and lawyers had to earn their money too. If Atlantic were making any changes, surely they’d have discussed it, like he would have with them. Jim was a southern man, forthright, decent. His word was his bond. “I didn’t bother to go down and read the whole distribution agreement,” Jim says. “I did not read the fine print in the contract. I more or less went on a gentlemen’s agreement.” When the Atlantic contract was placed before him, when he confirmed that his key-man request had been satisfied, he signed. He signed like Jerry knew he would, like anyone who knew Jim knew he would.

  10. A Rocket in Wing Tips

  1965–1966

  The summer of 1965 was hot even without feeling the temperature. President Johnson had escalated the war in Vietnam and would commit half a million troops before year’s end, opening a ground war. In April, 28,500 soldiers were there, and the next month, the number more than doubled to 68,500. William C. Brown, the neighborhood kid who’d run into the building when Jim first explored it, and his Mad Lads bandmate John Gary Williams both shipped out to the war overseas. “Miz Axton would pack them a box every month,” says Don Nix, “candies and things, and anybody who was around could throw stuff in. She’d ship it. When William came home, he said those things kept him alive over there.” Songwriter Homer Banks had returned the year before and landed a job in the record shop. Booker would have gone as a second lieutenant without his college deferment. “I was the battle group commander for Booker T. Washington High School,” he says. “I could dismantle an M1 blindfolded by the time I cut ‘Green Onions.’ I knew that gun inside and out.”

  William Bell returned from his two years of service and memorialized the time in his single “Marching off to War,” the B-side of “Share What You Got.” Set to a martial beat, this story of a soldier being shipped out and saying good-bye to his sweetheart captures the mid-1960s zeitgeist, the young man’s quandary: duty versus freedom, R-O-T-C versus L-O-V-E.

  Five years since Rufus and Carla put Stax on the map, the label and studio were coming into their own. The company released about thirty-five singles in 1964, double what it had done two years earlier, and it would maintain that output in ’65. Jim Stewart was no longer distracted by his day job at the bank, Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” was working its way to number two. Most important, the cogs had locked into place: the MG’s and Isaac supplied the music; Lady A, from behind the store’s sales counter, oversaw a creative songwriting team (David Porter, Deanie Parker, Steve Cropper, and, well, just about everyone there); and Jim Stewart supervised it all. The machine was well-oiled, in fine shape, and breaking with ease into high gear.

  Estelle, from the counter of the record shop, handled much of the promotional duties. DJs were fun to talk to—jive artists with effervescent personalities and strong opinions on the music. DJs were always on the make, angling to earn a little extra scratch—free copies they could sell, touring artists they could book for their local sock hop, anything to make a dime. (Distributors, on the other hand, were not as fun to talk to; they often owed money and were slow paying. Jim handled those calls, which usually ended with shouting. Jim had quit the bank and here he was, still chasing the unpaid accounts.)

  Estelle kept up with the hits, and she could give with the DJs as good as she got. She’d become tight with the top R&B jock in Los Angeles, the Magnificent Montague. His catchphrase “Burn, baby, burn,” had become part of the LA street lexicon. On the phone, they hatched a plan to bring a Stax Revue to Los Angeles. DJs made side money promoting performances, and Montague was deep into the Stax sound; he’d be a good promoter. The West Coast was where Stax needed help. As the plan developed, the trip grew to two weeks and included radio appearances and TV shows. A broadcast on KGFJ, Montague’s station, was arranged—that would get the general word out. Carla Thomas and the Astors were booked on Dick Clark’s TV show, Where the Action Is; Carla’s “Stop! Look What You’re Doin’” was breaking the top forty, and the Astors were hot with “Candy.” The MG’s were booked on Hollywood A Go Go playing one of their most aggressive songs, the guitar-heavy R&B top-ten hit “Boot-Leg.” It features the bar-walking sax of Packy Axton, who shares cowriting credit with Isaac Hayes, Al Jackson, and Duck Dunn. Ostracized at the studio due to his alcohol abuse, Packy was woven into this trip; his mom was organizing and chaperoning it. (“It was a very strange thing to watch him drink himself to death,” says Don Nix, from the Mar-Keys. “You went to school with this guy since the fifth grade and to watch him turn into an old man in just a few years, it was tough. He knew it was gonna kill him.”) Rufus Thomas, William Bell, and Wilson Pickett were part of the entourage, and their other television appearances included Shindig and The Lloyd Thaxton Show. It was a media frenzy, generating coverage in Billboard (an August 7, 1965, headline reads, STAX AND VOLT ARTISTS ON TV) and guaranteeing packed houses for the two nights of the gig Montague was promoting. He booked them into the 5-4 Ballroom, one of the hottest venues in Watts, a large African-American neighborhood in LA akin, somewhat, to Harlem in New York. (The 5-4 has been described as the Apollo of Watts.) Playing there, they’d reach the heart of their audience, a solid foundation on which the label could build.

  The group’s live sound was aggressive, playing faster and harder without losing the feel—sharp-edged. Montague was all over the mike, hyping the audience with his trademark chant, the audience fueling the artists’ flames with their enthusiasm. “Boot-Leg” may be the show’s highlight, the MG’s crunching the music like a hard rock band. It was summer and hot, and many in the state were angry over a proposition that overturned recent fair housing laws, giving landlords and sellers the right to openly discriminate; the proposition was so reactionary that all federal housing funds to California were terminated. No one could have known during the trip’s planning that long-standing racial tension in this community would explode coincidental with the Stax appearances. “They were holding lighters and matches and saying, ‘Burn, baby, burn,’” says Steve. “And we thought they just loved us to death but, naw, they were talking about something else.”

  While in California, Estelle took advantage of the distance between herself and her brother. Packy may have become a drunk, but he was still her son. So with Montague’s connection to recording studios and the greatest house band in the world among her entourage, and in a land where being female and an older sister didn’t restrict her like back home, she booked studio time and paid out of her pocket. Packy and the MG’s cut an album’s worth of instrumentals, including “Hole in the Wall,” a relaxed, jazzy tune in the mode of the recently released “The In Crowd”—perfectly catchy. Montague dropped in audience sounds and released the single on his own label, calling the band “The Packers.” “Hole in the Wall” took off, and word—or sound—got back to Memphis as it spread across the nation. The song hit number five on the R&B chart, nearly cracked the top forty on the pop chart, and the album hit number seven.

  “Estelle could make a recommendation, or try to persuade Jim to do something, or be very adamant about something that she felt strongly about,” says Deanie Parker, “and Jim would just—he would be a typical little brother. ‘Oh, Estelle, you don’t know, how can you know what you’re talking about?’ And she had that pose: She liked to smoke Parliament cigarettes, and she would fold one arm underneath her elbow, hold that cigarette, and she would say without looking at him, ‘Yes-I-do-know-what-I’m-talking-about. This is a hit. And all we need to do is add some horn lines to this, Jim, and put it out.’”

  The Stax hit on another label really heightened the pressure between the siblings. It can’t have helped that Packy—who Jim saw as an irresponsible derelict—was at the center of it. “I hit the ceiling,” says Jim. “It was like giving away a hit record.” (Not that he’d have allowed Packy in to cut it at Stax.) Mont
ague’s publishing company claimed every track, and the writing credits all included Montague, with the present MG’s sharing in “Hole,” and Packy sharing in only one track, which was not coincidentally the single’s B-side. Estelle’s response to Jim’s “how could you” was likely simple: Since you wouldn’t listen to me, I did it myself.

  “My sister has a lot of ideas,” Jim says. “She’s got a great ear for certain kinds of records, especially a left-field record. But after that fiasco with Montague, I really shut her down. I had to. I was very adamant about my artists playing on other records.” Jim wanted Packy banned from Stax, but with his mother as co-owner, he was never completely out of the picture.

  By the time most of the artists were flying home on August 11, the tense energy felt at the gigs was just being released—a highway patrol car had stopped a couple of black men in Watts, a crowd gathered, unrest fomented, and rocks were hurled. Several Stax artists saw smoke from the city as their plane departed. The next day, protests grew in Watts, and shortly, four thousand California National Guard troops were called out. Rioters numbered nearly thirty-five thousand. Over six days, thirty-four people were killed, hundreds injured, and tens of millions of dollars in damages occurred. “The story I got,” says Steve, “was that one of the first buildings to burn was the liquor store next to the 5-4 Ballroom.” Only days earlier, President Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act, with Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks among his special guests.

  As a promotional trip, Los Angeles had been a huge success, and it confirmed that many and varied promotional possibilities awaited if Stax had someone devoted to creating them. Estelle, Steve Cropper, and Jim had all come to this realization independently, though Estelle’s trip brought the need to the fore. “Jim Stewart recognized that if he were to continue doing what he loved doing most—and that was discovering and developing new talent, and recording hit after hit in Studio A,” says Deanie, who worked to get reviews and newspaper articles about the artists, “then he needed someone else to make certain that that product was being promoted on the radio. After all, the money came from the sale of records.” Only one person was really considered for the job, because the Stax folk knew who it should be: Al Bell, the former Memphis disc jockey who had moved to Washington, DC, and been responsible for breaking many Stax artists on the East Coast.