Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Al Bell was the Otis Redding of business. A head taller than almost everyone, he shot like a rocket in wing tip shoes. “Walk with me as we talk,” he’d say, on the move and getting things done, two at a time, minimally. His manner was authoritative, his demeanor approachable. He favored suits, always a necktie, a color-coordinated handkerchief, and he presented like a bank vice president, a career yet beyond reach for African-Americans. “Sales?” he might say. “Have you seen our sales thermometer this month? Nearly double last month’s sales and that’s the fourth month running.” Then he’d stop and look in your eye, hold your arm above your elbow, say something like, “But better than the income, the money is flowing back to the community. The way out of this social mess is economic empowerment, getting the money into the hands of the people.” Al Bell—his full name was Alvertis Isbell—inspired people, opening their eyes to possibilities accessible and dreams attainable.

  The ken of Al’s vision was a testament to the depth of his soul. He’d been raised in rural, racist Brinkley, Arkansas, and that which was intended to keep him down had planted the very seed from which his vision grew. “I grew up in a neighborhood that was obviously segregated. You had your blacks together and whites together, and then you had your various socioeconomic groups. Not too far from us was the working white community. There was a white man who had a fruit stand and small grocery about a half a block from where we lived, and he raised pedigree bulldogs. And that’s a place I was able to go and make a little money cleaning up after those filthy bulldogs. And this man inspired me, ’cause I heard him say one day, he said, ‘Niggers can’t do nothing but sing and dance.’ Well, it offended me. But it kept me thinking. And one day, for some odd reason, I realized: Singing and dancing, you make a lot of money. So that’s not a problem, that’s an opportunity.”

  In the latter 1950s, Alvertis prepared for the ministry at an Alabama Bible college, and for the business world at Arkansas’s Philander Smith College, where he hosted a radio program on the newly established KOKY, Little Rock, Arkansas’s first radio station programmed for an African-American audience. He established a small record label and began promoting concerts and dances, both gospel acts and sock hops, forging relationships with the Staple Singers among others. “Being in the record business was fun in college,” he says. “The DJ at the dance—everyone wanted to talk to you. You brought the band in, they carried your name to the world beyond, so after the Staple Singers liked you, you might get a call from Dorothy Woods’s manager, or Albertina Walker.” DJing, Al had a powerful sense of what moved people. During his morning show, the white kids from Central High and the black kids from Dunbar High would congregate in the studio and dance together. While the National Guard was called in to Little Rock in 1957 to desegregate Central High, Al Bell had created one safe interracial haven a few blocks away.

  Your six-feet-four bundle of joy, 212 pounds of Miss Bell’s baby boy.

  He’d announce, “This is your six-feet-four bundle of joy, two hundred and twelve pounds of Miss Bell’s baby boy. Soft as medicated cotton and rich as double-X cream. The women’s pet, the men’s threat, and the playboy’s pride and joy, the baby boy, A-a-a-a-l”—he’d pause to ring a jingaling—“Bell.”

  In 1959, Al left Arkansas and radio to join Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in Georgia, attending leadership workshops sponsored by the SCLC—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I realized during that period that I desired, like Dr. King, to have peace among us as ethnic groups,” Al says, “but I thought we needed to be in pursuit of economic empowerment and building an economic base for us as a people. I believed that our natural resource was music and that we could use it like the Irish used the whiskey, and the South Africans used diamonds. And if we built that economic base, then we could elect representatives in local, state, and national government to put forth laws that would assure that we had equal rights, and we would not be perceived as a liability but as an asset because of the contribution that we would be making to capitalism in this country.”

  Bell diverged from Dr. King in specifics: “At that time I carried a switchblade knife and was fairly prolific in the utilization of that instrument. On one occasion we had a march in Savannah, Georgia. The whites would holler, ‘You nigger!’ ‘Black SOB!’ and all this stuff. The words didn’t bother me. But there was a white gentleman, he spit and the spit hit me and I lost my cool. Before I knew it, I was out of my pocket with my switchblade knife, broke rank, and was going through the crowd after this guy. Hosea Williams and Ralph Abernathy came and got me. Doc [Dr. King] talked to me first about my knife. I said, ‘Well, Doc, I’m a Bible student myself and Jesus had Peter with him and Peter carried a sword.’ He laughed, because he couldn’t argue that point. Doc said to me, ‘But what I’m doing must come first. The people have to see us on television. They have to recognize that we even exist on the earth as a people and secondly, these dogs have to bite us, some of us have to be killed, we have to be beaten by these police and all of that so that the rest of the world could see how we have been treated.”

  Al left Georgia but not the movement, and in short order he was on radio in Memphis. The Satellite Record Shop and Stax studio provided him with material for his program, and when he moved to DC, a significantly larger, more active, African-American market, he took the sounds of Memphis with him and maintained his contacts at Stax. “Jim would send me dubs [preview copies of songs] and call me,” Al says. “He knew I had my fingers on the pulse of that market.”

  In DC, Bell had formed Safice Records with two new friends—singer and songwriter Eddie Floyd and promotional man Chester Simmons. (The name Safice is a jumble of the three men’s first and last initials.) The label cut a good song on Eddie Floyd, which Atlantic picked up for distribution, establishing a relationship between Al and Jerry Wexler. Al knew that Carla Thomas was at Howard University in Washington, DC, and early in 1965 he pitched her a couple songs he and Eddie Floyd had written, “Stop! Look What You’re Doin’,” and “Comfort Me.” Carla was fond of Al from his Memphis days and liked the songs; under Al’s direction, she cut demos at the radio station after it shut down at 5:30. He sent the demos to Memphis, and they came back with an invitation for him and Eddie Floyd to attend the Stax sessions. Soon, Bell and Floyd were in and out of town, writing songs with Steve Cropper and others, attending sessions. These occasional visits back to the fold energized the idea of inviting Al into the organization. The only problem was the perennial one: money, and the lack thereof.

  Jim didn’t like the idea of adding more staff, and he argued that Atlantic was doing fine promoting its product to DJs. “We needed promotion,” Estelle says. “We were making some hit records, and we needed help getting them played all over the country. Al was a good communicator, and he could convince these disc jockeys and program directors to play the records. That all goes along together—you can have a hit, but if you can’t get it heard, you can’t sell it.”

  “Business-wise, we were getting a little lost in the shuffle,” says Steve. “If a promotion guy walks into a radio station and he’s got six Atlantic records and one Stax record, what’s gonna happen?”

  Weighing his options, Jim liked the idea of lightening his business responsibilities, assuring him more creative time in the studio. He’d known Al since pitching him the Veltones record during Al’s college radio days. “My sister kept screaming we needed somebody to promote our product,” Jim says. “Al and I were friends when he was in Memphis, and when he went to Washington, I kept in touch. In my meager way, I had to promote the records.” Al had the skills and connections, and though Jim claims not to have weighed skin color in his decision—“I never thought of it in terms of needing to hire a black man”—hiring Al would enhance the administration’s credibility among the employees. They were already walking the walk, but assigning this authority to an African-American would mollify any potential political undercurrents. “Al was into what we were doing,” says Jim, “and he w
as very aggressive. Whatever he believes in, he’s going to try to make it happen.”

  Jim found he could readily agree to the need for a promotions man, but he was adamantly against paying for it. The record business had begun to treat him well. He was driving a Cadillac at the time, but he was a cautious, frugal businessman. “I told Wexler we were bringing in a promotion man,” Jim says, “and I felt they should pay half of Al’s salary. He would be promoting product they were making money on, too.” Wexler agreed to match Stax’s $100-per-week offer to Al Bell. This was how you got records played.

  “We weren’t a professional company before Al,” says Booker T. Jones. “We didn’t have big business going on. We had big music going on, but not big business. Al Bell was a businessman and a preacher. He wore a suit and tie, but he had a beard and he was announcing Blackness–which wasn’t done very much then. So we rallied around him. With Al, someone came in who could talk, who could sell, who knew how to dress, how to bring people together. It galvanized the whole operation. This was 1965 and there were black activists. You could see the cloud building; society was going to change.”

  Shortly after Al Bell joined Stax. L–R: Shirley Wexler, Jerry Wexler, Betty Cropper, Steve Cropper, Al Bell. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  “Jim called me,” says Al, “and said, ‘I’ve been talking with my sister and we want to convince you to take over as national promotion director of Stax.’ So I said, ‘Well, what can you pay me?’ He said, ‘I can give you a hundred dollars a week, and I talked to Jerry Wexler and he’ll also give you one hundred dollars a week.’ I said, ‘Two hundred bucks?’ My involvement in radio, in concert promotions—I was booking in the Howard Theater and Wilmer’s Park in Brandywine, Maryland—and my record hops, I was making high five figures in 1965. And he’s saying two hundred bucks?” Al laughs at the memory of the conversation.

  The salary was not going to draw Al back home, but the potential would. “I had a great love for Stax music, and having seen the reaction of the people in Washington, DC, to that music, and the experiences that I was having with the people at Stax, I had a greater appreciation and belief in what could happen with their music.” That spoke louder than the paycheck. “At some point,” says Jim about the negotiations, “Al said, ‘I’ve got to have more than just a salary.’ And we agreed to promising him a percentage of the company.”

  Things happened fast upon Al Bell’s arrival in the early autumn of 1965. He fostered an environment with an emphasis on growth. “I took a poster board and drew a thermometer and filled it at the bottom with red ink. As sales increased, and revenue increased, I would increase the mercury. And at the very top of the thermometer, I had it explode out into what I called Heaven. And that was after we had achieved our goal.”

  “Al said when we filled that bubble at the top,” relates Steve, “he’s gonna give everybody a bonus. Man, we couldn’t wait to come in there on Monday morning and see where that mark was gonna be.”

  “So every week I’d calibrate the red in the thermometer,” Al continues, “and the producers and the writers and any visitors, they’d see that thermometer just increasing, increasing, increasing. And as it increased, the morale increased, and eventually it exploded into Heaven.”

  The price for all the increased sales was mostly paid by Booker T. & the MG’s. Jim worked them hard, but with a passion. “More important than the record,” says Jim, “was the making of the record. The fun became work after the tape stopped rolling.”

  “You could sense Jim’s dissatisfaction,” says Booker about Jim as a producer. “He would have a tendency to be quiet and look away. But you could tell when he was happy. When he liked a song he’d snap his fingers and dance around.” Duck concurs: “He didn’t like too many augmented changes, he liked natural. He sat in the control room, would have his head leaning on his hand, and I’d think, What the hell is wrong? We’d be on the floor thinking we were playing our butts off, and he’s sitting up there acting like he’s bored. I thought, Are you really getting what we’re doing out here? But Jim had a great musical ear.” “Jim could hear well,” Floyd Newman says. “Violin players, they hear concert notes right off. He would say, ‘That doesn’t sound right, let’s change it to this.’ There was no browbeating, no domineering. It was very casual, very loose.”

  Sharing Jim’s office, Al received a full course in the Stax world. “What was precious about working in that one office with Jim and spending so many hours with him was his determination to record and release authentic music. I was amazed to hear his passion for Little Walter and Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins and B.B. King and all of these blues giants. And it was fascinating to see him go into the studio and with that same passion work those MG’s to the point of near exhaustion. Jim would sit behind the board and have the MG’s playing and he would not stop or give them a decent look until they had gotten a groove. His favorite criticism was, ‘That’s too busy.’ And it forced them into playing less so you got more. But he worked them, and it got too bad until the guys came to me on one occasion and said, ‘Can you do something to convince Jim to get out of the studio a little bit more so we can get a break?’ But it was that drive that was in Jim Stewart that really caused Stax to become what it became.”

  Al also learned from Estelle. “We could always go to Miz Axton and get those words of wisdom,” Al says. “I shared with her the problems that I was having with disc jockeys resisting our music. She said, ‘Al, have you read a book called The Power of Positive Thinking? Go read that book, then come back and ask me that question.’ Well, I never went back to her after I read the book because that was the answer. That book had a profound impact on my life. In our growing-up years, we had the musical drive of Jim Stewart, and we had the spiritual drive of Estelle Axton. And all of us came through that.”

  This was an environment that suited Al Bell. “Al would call his friend in Detroit, and call his friend in LA,” says Steve. “He knew a lot of the disc jockeys, and he communicated with these guys. They all liked to know what was going on.” Bell was not only promoting, he was exploring. “They would share this information,” Steve continues, “and then we would have production meetings. We started doing that every Monday morning, early, before sessions would start. We’d sit down and talk about what the trends were. A lot of times, we’d play stuff we had recorded the week before, and get everybody’s feelings about it.” Al was cultivating communication, within the building and beyond its walls.

  “Al was exclusively in promotion to begin with,” Jim says. “He traveled almost constantly. He had to build relationships. He was on the road seventy-five percent of the time in the first couple years. When we hired other promotion men, he began spending more time at the company.” The persuasive magic that Al worked over the radio and telephone was ever more powerful in person.

  Al had a way of seeing the best in everything. Motown wasn’t competition, it was complementary. “Motown was the wind beneath our wings,” he explains. “Berry Gordy was a master of taking soul music and giving it the cosmopolitan flavor, great melodies, great rhythms that were immediately accepted by the European-Americans. It made them more comfortable at the radio level and retail with African-Americans.” With a dedicated promotions man—and not just anyone, but the formidable Al Bell—Stax was ready to knock on, and knock down, many a door.

  11. Kings and Queens of Soul

  1965–1966

  A promotions man needs records to promote, and the timing of Al Bell’s arrival was serendipitous. As he was settling in, the studio was delivering great material: an artistic breakthrough by Otis Redding; a Mad Lads hit that Al could peddle in the Northeast, where his connections were solid and fresh; and the establishment of a style by Sam and Dave. Stax had been releasing great records all along, but with Al on staff dedicated to getting airplay, he made his heavenly explosion a reality.

  By the summer of 1965, Otis was on a hot streak. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” had begun creeping up the char
ts less than a month after its release. “Mr. Pitiful” had just slipped off the charts, but not off the DJs’ turntables. Each of his previous singles had hit the pop charts, sometimes each side charting separately as a hit. Fortunately for Stax, as Al Bell signed on, so did Otis, reupping his contract for another five years. Why not? Jim had just re-signed with Atlantic, solidifying that relationship. Otis got an improved royalty rate—5 percent when previously he’d had 3 percent. There was a living to be made as a successful recording artist, but the fast money and the bigger money came through performance fees.

  Living the dream, Otis wore out the road, taking his thirteen-piece band everywhere he could get a gig. Hit records drew more people to the shows, getting him into bigger clubs, allowing him to command higher fees. But every night he was in the studio meant he was not getting a gig fee, and it was becoming harder to get him to swing through Stax. Finally, with enough planning, a session was squeezed into his summer ’65 schedule: He’d arrive and polish some material with Steve Cropper the first day, then they’d hit the studio to record as much as they could in about twenty-four hours; after a nap, he’d fly out to his next gig. The intention was to complete an album, which would be his third. Albums were a way to repackage established hits, surrounding them with misses and studio extras; profit margins were higher on albums, so record labels liked to get them out such as the hits allowed—and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” was providing an opportunity.