Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  For reasons lost to history, the days Otis could get off the road fell on a Friday and Saturday, meaning he would miss the weekend gig opportunities and several of the Stax band would have to break during the marathon session to make their gigs. The task was monumental, and Jim asked Atlantic’s Tom Dowd to come help him engineer. “I got a call midweek,” says Tom, “‘Can you be here by Friday at noontime?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure, what’s happening?’ And they said, ‘We gotta make an album with Otis but he’s got a gig on Sunday.’ So I got to the studio and it was done in a day and a night, and then Otis was gone!”

  The session—an all-nighter with horns, vocals, and full band being recorded live and without overdubs—resulted in one of the greatest soul music albums ever recorded, Otis Blue. It’s a telling snapshot of where Otis, Stax, and soul music found themselves in July 1965. Half a year earlier, Sam Cooke had been murdered in Los Angeles, and Redding—whose raw and gritty style was very different from the smooth and suave sounds of Cooke—pays tribute to the man and his influence, recording three of his songs, including a solemn and moving take on “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Defining soul music’s breadth—the album’s subtitle is Otis Redding Sings Soul—he renders a blues from B.B. King; a funked-up take on the traditional “Down in the Valley” (“Oh, man,” says Duck Dunn about that one, “he took a song and just kicked your ass with it”); a gritty take on the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” (a reciprocation for their cutting his “That’s How Strong My Love Is”—and a reach for that elusive white audience); a pared-down Memphis arrangement of Motown’s “My Girl”; and, for the home team, William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water.” The album is jarring in its intensity. “Old Man Trouble” opens, the guitar immediate and doleful—No, no, no, it can’t be this sad—and the horns hit—Yes, yes, yes, it will be this sad, and Otis pleads on our behalf such that we’d want no one else pleading for us.

  (Photograph by Don Nix/Courtesy of the Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture, Steve Todoroff Collection)

  And then there is “Respect.” “Respect” is one of Otis Redding’s greatest songs, and a perfect example of Al Jackson’s leadership in the studio. Drums are often considered a group’s anchor, but in this case, the drums are the grand marshal. The song starts as a 4/4 pounding, and the band, the singer, the horns—everyone’s chugging along to keep up with the drummer. By the song’s end, you can almost feel the group’s effort to maintain Al’s pace. His fills are battle cries, announcing the emphatic moments. At the song’s end, it’s a duet between drums and vocalist, the band serenading them. “Respect” belies the notion that the Memphis groove was just behind the beat; sometimes it may have been (“Last Night” comes to mind), but sometimes it was way ahead. The groove was where Al Jackson wanted it to be.

  Otis’s manager, Phil Walden, was just being discharged from the military and he came straight to Memphis to see Otis in the studio. “While Phil was gone,” says Dowd, “Otis had become a successful artist. Phil came to Memphis and Joe Galkin ran out to the airport. It was Saturday, we were about seven or eight songs done, and Phil was standing there in uniform with his discharge ribbons on and he’s saying, ‘Ah cain’t believe it!’ Ha ha . . . Boom! Poof! Next! We knocked off the whole album in a day and a night.” Joe Galkin arranged for Jim to cut Otis in on the publishing, and Phil established a publishing company for Otis—and himself—using the Stax model of nomenclature (Redding-Walden) to form Redwal; “Respect” was the first song they published, which paid dividends in 1967 when Aretha Franklin took her version of the song to number one on the pop charts. Also riding along was Stax’s publishing company, East Music, and Galkin’s publishing company, Time; so on “Respect,” for example, every publishing penny that came in was split three ways, with each company then paying the writer half. (The standard publishing deal split the money fifty-fifty between the publishing company and the writer; if a writer had enough clout to have his own company, he got more of the pot; many who didn’t know about publishing got less, or none.) The publisher nearly always got paid.

  Otis Blue gave Al Bell plenty of material to promote. Three singles hit the top five of the R&B charts—“I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” “Respect,” and “Satisfaction.” The album hit number seventy-five on the pop charts, and if it didn’t sell enough at once to burst higher, it sold steadily, present on the album chart for thirty-four weeks.

  Otis slept a bit when the session was done, then shot out to his next gig. He’d burn up the road, expanding his popularity for the next half year, returning to Stax in early November 1965 to record another masterpiece, the Al Jackson–led, Duck Dunn–fueled, inspired-horns-afire “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” Opening with Duck’s slinky, hip-shaking bass riff, the part doubled by Steve’s guitar, Al joins hot on their heels, pounding the drums like a raging child, the horns playing what has to be one of their greatest-ever get-up-on-your-feet riffs—and that’s just in the song’s first five seconds. It never lets up, nearly three minutes of propulsion, and is neck and neck with “Respect” for the greatest dance song Otis ever recorded, the greatest drumming Al Jackson ever delivered.

  The gigs were paying off for Otis. He bought 270 acres outside Macon, naming it the Big O Ranch, and built a beautiful twelve-room home for his family there. In an effort to see more of his wife and three kids, he bought a small plane. But mostly he stayed on the road, playing the gigs, with Phil Walden angling for that pop crossover, booking him into Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go club for a three-day run in the spring of 1966. The hottest club on the famed Sunset Strip, it had clientele accustomed to rock and folk-rock bands—the Byrds, Johnny Rivers, the Doors—and if soul music was something they’d heard of, it was distant, exotic, unfamiliar. Otis’s reputation was powerful enough to attract a full house for the first night, but the audience’s lack of response to the MC’s opening exhortations was evidence of the bridge to be crossed. When Otis took the stage, instincts kicked in and the West Coast whites couldn’t help but groove to the good tunes. Seven sets over three nights were packed. Pioneering producer Phil Spector invited Otis to his house; Bob Dylan came backstage with an acetate of “Just Like a Woman,” a song he wanted Otis to record. (Otis later told Phil Walden it had too many words.) “His gig at the Whisky a Go Go was probably the most exciting thing that rock-worn room has ever harbored,” wrote Los Angeles Times critic Pete Johnson. “He was a magic singer with an unquenchable store of energy and a great flittering band. Crowds never sat still when he was onstage nor could they stay quiet when he asked them for a response, because he gave them too much to leave them strangers.”

  In late 1966, Otis made his first visit to Europe. Otis Blue had hit the top of the European charts, indicating a strong welcome awaited. Further, breaking into Europe could be a way to the hearts of America’s white audience; the British Invasion of new music was in full swing. Phil booked ten days, including an incendiary TV appearance on Ready, Steady, Go!, and the payoff came pretty quick, with famed San Francisco promoter Bill Graham showing up on Phil Walden’s Georgia doorstep to invite Otis for three nights at the Fillmore. “Every artist in [San Francisco] asked to open for Otis,” Graham writes in his autobiography. “The first night, it was the Grateful Dead. Janis Joplin came at three in the afternoon the day of the first show to make sure that she’d be in front. To this day, no musician ever got everybody out to see them the way he did.”

  As Otis’s popularity spread, he brought Stax with him. “Otis was growing in record sales and public acceptance,” Al says from the front lines. “Otis was becoming our standard-bearer. The world was beginning to view Stax as Otis Redding, and when they heard Stax music, they heard Otis Redding.”

  One group at Stax that stood out from the others was the Mad Lads. Instead of the gritty soul tradition, they were four male singers influenced by the smooth vocal harmonies of the Philadelphia and Baltimore doo-wop groups. This sound didn’t interest Jim very much, but Estelle liked the guys and, never dissuaded by the
tension with her brother, she encouraged them. “Estelle had been trying to persuade Jim to cultivate a group of male vocalists that could rival this spectacular harmony coming off the East Coast,” says Deanie. Singer William C. Brown worked in her record shop; he and John Gary Williams, John Phillips, and Julius Green were always around there singing. “I named them the Mad Lads,” says Deanie, “because that is what they were: energetic and all over the place.” Mrs. Axton suggested she and Deanie collaborate on a song for them. “She brought a book of poems one day, told me, ‘Read some of these poems, they’re so simple.’ Estelle loved a simple message. She loved love songs—I think she was a romantic at heart. She wrote the first verse and titled it ‘I Want Someone.’ Then I wrote the melody and we finished it. Then, she says, ‘Now let’s get the Mad Lads.’”

  Deanie Parker and Al Jackson Jr. (Deanie Parker Collection)

  “I Want Someone” features vibrato-heavy instruments—you can’t tell if it’s a guitar or an organ, and it sounds like it’s floating to the top of a fish tank in bursts of bubbles. (It’s Isaac on the organ, at Packy’s suggestion. “Packy said, ‘I hear a sound like Shep and the Limelites,’” says Packy’s friend Johnny Keyes. “He said, ‘Can you do that on the organ?’”) The vocals knit a fabric made of blues, pop, and church, handing off lines to horns, or harmonizing with them. “We taught the Mad Lads that song and produced that record,” Deanie continues. “It became a big hit. She made her point to Jim, and I was thrilled to be a part of another one of her little enterprises.” Al Bell used “I Want Someone” and also the group’s “Don’t Have to Shop Around” to insinuate them with his cohorts in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, New York, and Boston. Once in these markets with the Mad Lads, Al would have plenty more to offer.

  Estelle’s ongoing battles with Jim were not shouting matches (well, rarely so), and were not usually bitter. “It was productive competition,” Deanie says. “It was a family at Stax, and Jim and Estelle played a major role in that. And we were extensions of their philosophies.”

  In addition to vocal groups, Estelle wanted the company to put out more blues. While soul music had decidedly become the new sound of young African-American society, blues remained a very popular seller in the record store. Jim, however, saw no sizable market for straight blues. When Albert King came strolling into Estelle’s record shop, she approached him . . . like a spider to a fly. “I’d been selling blues records on other artists and I had to do a lot of talking to the people in the back to get them interested in doing blues, because they just couldn’t see a real blues record selling.” “Laundromat Blues” hit number twenty-nine on the R&B charts, and Albert King became a member of the Stax family. Al Bell liked blues, and he knew the jocks who still played it.

  Jim’s conservative nature cost the company a couple opportunities (though the payoff would only be clear in retrospect). In Autumn 1966, Jerry Wexler called Jim with a proposal, one of those alternate realities that leaves the mind boggled: He’d just picked up the contract on a young singer who had pipes but who lacked direction. She’d put out eight albums on Columbia and had enjoyed a little chart action; Wexler wondered if Jim would like to buy Aretha Franklin’s contract from him. “I had such respect for Booker T. and the MG’s and all the guys,” Jerry says. “I thought they would do a hell of a job on her. I said, ‘There’s only one thing, there’s a twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance.’” Jim had opened the purse a bit to hire Al Bell, but that purse quickly snapped shut. “Jim said he’d pass.” Wexler pauses, then adds, “Thank you, Jesus.”

  “I didn’t want to spend that kind of money for an act,” says Jim. “Aretha Franklin wasn’t selling then. Jerry took a gamble. I could have signed Gladys Knight for five grand even earlier, but it’s against my principle. Why should I pay five grand? I could cut an album for five grand. I had never paid an artist to sign a contract. Front money was not even a word in my vocabulary. In retrospect, I should have been a little more receptive in those areas.”

  Fortunately, another Stax act was about to break out and enjoy a stellar run for the next couple years. Sam and Dave’s “I Take What I Want” hadn’t charted, but their performance excited their songwriters, Isaac Hayes and David Porter, whose synchronicity was just starting to hum. “There’s a gospel tune, ‘You don’t know like I know, what the lord has done for me,’” says Isaac with a grin. “I said, ‘What if I turned this around? ‘You don’t know like I know, what that woman has done for me.’” So David and I commenced, I did the horn arrangements on it, brought in Wayne Jackson with a flugelhorn—fat sound. Bam!” Converting a church song, Isaac and David had the blues singing in praise of earthly delights. Sam and Dave corralled that holy energy and with Al Bell now promoting records at Stax, “You Don’t Know” went to number-seven R&B and hit the pop charts too. It was their first of eight consecutive singles that would land in the R&B top twenty; half of those landed in the top five, two of which were number one.

  That hit ignited the songwriting team of Hayes and Porter. “We wrote for practically everybody on the label,” Isaac continues. “It was a good time for Stax, like a family. During the summer months in midafternoon when we were sweltering and sweating and toiling—the studio didn’t have air-conditioning—we’d knock off and go downtown to the Lorraine Motel, chill out and hit the pool. Bailey, the proprietor, would fry some chicken and we’d lay back until about seven in the evening, then go back to work again. In wintertime we’d freeze to death. We had one heater on the wall, and we’d all crowd around it and that’s where the ideas came from. It was a loose kind of working thing, and the ideas and creativity were just flowing.”

  Isaac describes a fluidity between their lives and their art, a collaboration that gushed: “Carla Thomas’s ‘B-A-B-Y’—I got that title from my second wife, she was calling me ‘baby’ a lot.” He goes on. “One day David and I were tired, went home, and David’s wife at the time, he sat in the easy chair, pondering and toiling, and she said, ‘What’s wrong? Is something wrong with my baby?’ David jumped up and he rang me. ‘I got it, I got it.’ Tired after a whole day’s work, he got that inspiration and fired me up, came to my house and we wrote ‘When Something Is Wrong with My Baby.’ Sam and Dave came in—another hit record!”

  A later configuration of the recording setup. (Drawing by Steve Cropper/Courtesy of René Wu)

  The songwriters’ success came right on time for Jim. The label was accumulating talented singers, and his concern was that they have good songs. “We began developing writing teams,” he says. “Homer Banks, Bettye Crutcher, Raymond Jackson, and others. David Porter was in charge of developing the writing teams. David was never jealous, and he’d give everything he had. He was not worried about the competition. We had workshops, bringing writers in, working with them. The company really concentrated on that writing staff.”

  “You have to have that burning desire to achieve,” advises Isaac, “regardless of the odds or the circumstances. We came from humble beginnings, to put it mildly, and we stuck through it until something happened. We pushed each other. When we started writing hit songs, we both bought Cadillac El Dorados. Same day. Then we bought Rivieras, after that a convertible. David and I did everything together.”

  Another new artist and songwriter came in the door around this time, and he would also become a hitmaker. Eddie Floyd, from Montgomery, Alabama, had been partners in a record label with Al Bell in Washington, DC, and had visited Stax to write and demo records when Al began making the treks from Washington. “I get to Memphis,” says Eddie, “and it’s a little theater, and everybody contributes to putting songs together. It was perfect.”

  Steve remembers Al making it a point that he meet Eddie. “Al Bell saw the potential in me,” says Steve, “and said, ‘You know, I’ve got a guy that you could cowrite with.’ I didn’t know who Eddie was. But when Eddie told me about the Falcons, I knew them. [Wilson Pickett had been in the Falcons with Eddie.] We sat in a hotel room, and we just hit it off.”


  “They made a deal with me to come down something like every other month,” Eddie says, “write songs with all the guys. But I always wanted to record.” While Steve was driving to Eddie’s room just off from the pool at the Lorraine Motel, he saw a Coca-Cola billboard, and the two, later joined by Wayne Jackson, set to writing. The soft drink’s motto at the time was “Things go better with Coke.” Unable to shake that from their minds, they made it their own, and “Things Get Better” became Eddie Floyd’s first release as an artist on Stax.

  Eddie’s old bandmate Wilson Pickett returned to Stax in December of 1965. Before that, in the wake of Pickett’s first visit, Atlantic had sent down Don Covay, a soul singer they’d recently signed but had been unable to break. At Stax in June of 1965, Covay’s sessions resulted in two of the strongest outings of his career, “See Saw” and “Sookie Sookie,” both stone soul classics.

  The music was good, but the vibe wasn’t; Covay rubbed the players wrong, and that amplified the imbalance in the relationship with Atlantic that Jim was feeling. Big sales meant big money—for Atlantic. When Pickett came back, he was ever more full of bravado and his own self. He’d been difficult enough to get along with before he was a star; now “Midnight Hour” had become a huge hit. “Wilson grew up in the street,” says Steve, “and he carried that with him.”

  Musically, it was a match made in soul heaven, but Pickett was no angel. Two songs were cut on Pickett’s first day back—“634-5789” and “99 and a Half Won’t Do,” the first going to number one, the second to number thirteen—but tension ripped the session apart. When the band went outside, cooling their heels away from the man of fire, he walked out to try and buy their affection, offering each $100 if they’d come back inside and cut with him. Their self-respect cost more than that, and Pickett was spurned, leading Jim Stewart to phone Wexler and tell him, though the arrangement seemed promising, not to send any more of Atlantic’s stars to Stax to cut the greatest songs of their careers. “The guys shut that door,” says Jim. “They said, ‘Don’t bring that asshole down here again. We don’t have to put up with that crap.’ The guys loved working with Tom Dowd and Jerry Wexler. They just didn’t want to be subjected to Wilson.”