Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  The Beatles had not called Motown in Detroit, and while the African-American label in the North continued to dominate Stax in sales, it did not dominate in soul. The Beatles canceled, but artists from Elton John to Janis Joplin and the Monkees all came through. Stax was setting the bar for grit and feeling in commercial music.

  Even by 1966, it was difficult for an integrated group to drink a cup of coffee in public, much less dine formally or casually in Memphis. Usually, establishments that catered to African-Americans were more welcoming to mixed groups and to visiting whites. The Lorraine Motel’s small restaurant and swimming pool were always hospitable, the prices were reasonable, and that was where Stax would usually host its guests. “When I’d come to Memphis, I stayed at the Lorraine,” says Eddie Floyd. “And that’s where we would write songs. Mr. Bailey, who owned the motel, he didn’t care about the noise and he liked having us around.”

  “Anytime you went to the Lorraine,” remembers Mavis Staples, who traveled often through the South with her gospel-singing family, the Staple Singers, “it was like a reunion. Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Little Junior Parker, Joe Hinton—everyone stayed at the Lorraine Motel. Mr. Bailey and his wife and daughter [the motel was named for the daughter] had a nice restaurant there, and it was just the motel for blacks in Memphis. That was home away from home.”

  “We used their dining room for our meeting hall and we swam in their pool,” says Booker T. Jones. “We ate there on a regular basis. The Lorraine Motel was an institution for us.”

  Eddie Floyd (Photograph by API Photographers/API Collection)

  “When I was writing songs with Eddie Floyd,” says Steve, “Mr. Bailey would give us the honeymoon suite if he didn’t have it booked. It was plush red velvet everywhere, a big room, and it was great.”

  Eddie’s “Knock on Wood” was written at the Lorraine. “Steve and I were trying to write a track for Otis Redding,” says Eddie. “We’re sitting at the Lorraine in the summer. It’s storming, there’s lightning, and we’re trying to come up with a song. Steve’s strumming, and I had an idea for a line: knock on wood. Steve had the idea about the rabbit foot for good luck, and stepping over those cracks in the sidewalk, black cats, all that. Then I told him the story of when I was a kid in Montgomery, Alabama, when it was storming big like that, thunder and lightning, we used to hide under the bed, and we’d be frightened. He said, ‘That’s it, that’s it!’”

  “Wayne Jackson was playing in West Memphis, and I called him on a break,” says Steve, “said, ‘We’ve got a great song, when you get off your gig, come by the Lorraine and help me with the horn arrangements because I want to cut this tomorrow morning.’”

  This wasn’t the first time Wayne had received such a call. “I’d go to the Lorraine, sit on the edge of the bed, and there Steve’d be with a guitar and a singer,” says Wayne. “I’d use a mute so that I wouldn’t wake people. I’d play the little horn lines that they were talking about, or try something else. We’d work until everybody was tired. I could remember the lines till the morning, and in the studio we’d have a song to show everybody.”

  “The next morning,” says Steve, “we worked it up with the band. Hour or two later, we had it cut.”

  Eddie credits Al Jackson with making the song a hit. “He said, ‘Let me put something in there.’” Eddie laughs. “And he put in a break where everyone stops and he hits the drum, like knocking on the door. Everybody laughed, but that’s what makes it. If he hadn’t did that, I’m convinced it wouldn’t have been a hit.”

  “Knock on Wood” was cut as a demo for Otis Redding, but once done, it didn’t sound like Otis’s style. So Stax released it, and with Al Bell promoting it, Eddie’s demo hit the number-one spot on the R&B charts and became a top-forty pop hit.

  Hits created a cash flow, with money for the songwriters and the label based on numbers of copies sold, and money for the artists based on radio play (and the reward of better-paying gigs). But the musicians who backed the artist were paid per session, union scale, whether the song hit or missed. (Often their pay was considerably less, what the union termed “demo scale”—fifteen dollars—with the remaining fifty to come if the song were actually released.) At studios in New York and Los Angeles, union rules stipulated that sessions were three hours and it was expected that four songs could be cut in that time. Musicians arrived, were given sheet music, and they played the part as written. At Stax, a song might be sketched out, as “Knock on Wood” was, or it might develop in the studio and need to be rehearsed over time. “We might spend a month working on four, five, six artists and records,” says Steve, “trying to get a hit single on them.” The pay wouldn’t come until the recording session did.

  The studio stars kept their club dates because they needed regular income. When Steve phoned Wayne for help with “Knock on Wood,” Wayne was working a nightclub gig into the wee hours. He had a wife and kids at home. He was selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door in the daytime, catnapping in his car. Most of these musicians, cutting hit after hit after hit, were scrounging to make a living. Al Jackson was in the clubs at night. Booker, recently resettled in Memphis after college, was taking club gigs. And most of these players were feeding young families, too.

  Duck Dunn, who was playing on all the hits, was still working days at King Records and nights at the Rebel Room or Hernando’s Hideaway, in addition to sessions—just to make ends meet. “I’d work till two in the morning on the bandstand,” says Duck, “then stop on the way home to see Al Jackson till four and then be at King Records at eight. My wife used to take a broom and poke me to wake me up. I went out and did Shindig! and I left [my wife] June and my son Jeff with fifty dollars. I’m doing Hollywood TV and we’re living off peanut butter, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  Al Bell was increasingly aware of their struggles to make a living. He saw the yawning, the bags under the eyes. “Finally,” Duck continues, “Al Bell says, ‘We need to put these guys on salary.’ Man, it relieved me from working till two in the morning. That’s one reason I respect Al so much—he took me out of my nighttime job and made me a studio musician.”

  After giving them $125 a week, Al took the incentives even further by spearheading the move to form a production pool, a pot of royalty money to be equally shared by the six key players responsible for most of the sessions and hits. With his track record of success, Al held some sway with Jim, and he convinced him of the benefits. “The MG’s became the group that backed everybody,” says Al. “Whether it was Albert King with his blues, or Carla Thomas with her pop, or William Bell—they adapted to whomever it was that came in the studio. And Isaac and David were doing most of the writing and lots of the producing.” Stax was being paid a royalty from Atlantic of about 15 percent, and Al arranged for a sliver of that money to be divided equally between the four MG’s and Hayes and Porter. “It was the fairest way to give them a producer’s revenue,” Al says. The more hits they made, the more these six core players would earn.

  “Al made Booker T. & the MG’s and David and Isaac part of the company,” says Duck. “And what can I say? Here’s a gift that saved my life.”

  The production pool resulted in a new distribution of duties, with each key player assuming responsibility for certain artists, and each being made a company vice president. Steve had Eddie and Otis. Al Jackson had Albert King and a few others; often he and Duck shared. Booker had William Bell, later Albert King—and there was fluidity within the designations. Thereafter, all the albums and many of the singles included a producer’s credit.

  While generous, this also further compartmentalized a very collaborative organization. If one player were designated as producer, would the others feel as free to introduce suggestions? Or would that be stepping on toes? Or contributing with no reward? Suddenly there were proprietary concerns and a new layer of politics. “In my mind that was one of the things that began to break down the Stax structure,” says Booker. “I was vice president of something and I had an office. But I was
n’t feeling it.” No one was bemoaning the better money, but the new emphasis on individual profit introduced weeds into the garden.

  13. Fatback Cacciatore

  1967

  Stax stood tall as a symbol of opportunity, a beacon in the neighborhood, the glow from the ascending stars ensconcing nearby residents. Deanie Parker, who had enlisted local kids into her Stax-Volt Fan Club, hired them for small change to help get mass mailings packed and ready. In the label’s conference room, they’d be stuffing envelopes, the excited chatter audible through much of the building. William Bell, Rufus Thomas, Carla—artists would stop in and encourage the kids, thank them for helping. And Stax’s light shone brighter.

  There was one group of African-American teenagers who had penetrated the studio doors earlier, and gotten in deeper, than the others: the Bar-Kays. “Every spare chance we got,” says bassist James Alexander, “we’d go down to Stax to watch various people play.” After performing at Booker T. Washington High School, they got a nightclub gig across the Mississippi River in West Memphis—even though they weren’t old enough to be inside. They’d recently met the white keyboardist Ronnie Caldwell, also a high school student, and become an integrated band. “It was pretty unusual at that time to integrate,” James continues, “and the Bar-Kays and Booker T. & the MG’s were two of the first groups around here to do it.”

  Originally named the Impalas after the car that got them to gigs, they rechristened themselves the Bar-Kays; it was inspired by a Bacardi Rum billboard with letters missing, and it evoked Stax’s Mar-Keys. They played Willie Mitchell’s hit “20-75,” Junior Walker’s “Shotgun,” and the funky, Latin-tinged “Watermelon Man.” They covered Ray Charles and even worked up a couple Beatles tunes, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and an original take on “Michelle.” “We wanted to be a band,” explains James, “but we wanted to act like a vocal group, doing steps like the Temptations.” They could back a vocalist or carry a set with just their instruments, their energy drawing the audience from their seats—a good time for the band, the dancers and listeners, and soon for the club owners. Sometimes, they’d get calls for sessions. Ben Cauley had recently played trumpet on Carla Thomas’s “B-A-B-Y” and several Rufus Thomas songs.

  Signing the charter for the Stax-Volt Fan Club, surrounded by kids from the Soulsville neighborhood. L–R: Deanie Parker, Al Bell, Jim Stewart, Julian Bond. (Deanie Parker Collection)

  There’s a difference between playing a club and making a recording, and when the Bar-Kays auditioned for Steve Cropper on a Saturday morning, Steve didn’t think their cover songs showed promise. James Alexander remembers him saying, “I just don’t think you all got what it takes.” Undeterred, the Bar-Kays practiced harder.

  “Soul Finger,” the song that would establish them upon its spring 1967 release, grew from their club gig. They were working at the Hippodrome on Beale Street, among the top-tier clubs on what was still the South’s African-American Main Street. Too young to be in the club, too good not be there, they were vamping at the end of another song and fell into a musical pattern that made them all take notice. “When it was done, nobody said anything,” James remembers. “We looked at each other like, There’s something to this. We ain’t thinking this could be the start of a record or anything but we don’t know what it was, because we’re still young.”

  They came back and auditioned again for Steve. They’d worked up an instrumental titled “Don’t Do That,” a horn-and-guitar exchange with a popping snare drum that was getting hot in the clubs. Perhaps Steve’s ear had become tired or his patience had worn thin by the steady flow of auditions; he still didn’t hear it. “When we were leaving the studio, Jim Stewart saw us and said, ‘Why are you guys up here?’ We’re feeling kind of low, and we said, ‘We were just auditioning for Steve Cropper.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I want you to come back up here on Sunday and audition for me.’”

  When they played their original for Jim, he was impressed. He was also attracted by their youth; Estelle had been hounding him to consider creating a new studio band, both to give the MG’s a break and to infuse new ideas into the scene. Trumpeter Ben Cauley remembers that Jim stepped away from the studio for a moment, and while he was gone, they returned to the groove they’d stumbled onto while vamping at the Hippodrome. “I’ll never forget it,” Ben says. “He came back and said, ‘Fellas, what’s that? Do it again.’ We played and he said, ‘Let’s cut it right now.’”

  The song needed an introduction, and Jim needed to set audio levels for recording. “He ran up into the control room and said to run it down,” James says. “It wasn’t a big elaborate studio—just a little recording board, he turned a few knobs. You didn’t even have a talkback button, you’d send hand signals. Ben came up with this nursery rhyme horn lick, Jim gave us a signal to play it from the top, and when we recorded it, we had ‘Soul Finger.’”

  Well, they had most of it. Jim played it at the staff meeting that Monday morning, and David Porter suggested putting teenage party sounds on it. “David told us to find some kids and have them come to Stax after classes,” James says. “He went to the College Street Sundry, across from Stax, and bought a case of the short Cokes in the little green bottle. The deal was if all these people hollered and screamed and shouted on our record, you get a free Coca-Cola.” Porter set up a mike in the studio and recorded the kids while copying the master track onto a new tape—the overdubbing process at the time. He cued them when to shout “soul finger” and gave the song a party atmosphere.

  James Alexander, bassist in the Bar-Kays. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  The record was released in April of ’67 on Stax’s Volt subsidiary, most of the band still in high school. The flip side was another instrumental, this one written by Cropper and Booker T. Jones, featuring Jones on harmonica. The song was named “Knucklehead” in honor of James Alexander. “My nickname was Knuck, which comes from Knucklehead Smith [the name of a ventriloquist’s sidekick from a late-1950s TV program]. I was always slow to learn my part, and when Isaac and David would be teaching us stuff, they had to keep going over it with me.”

  The single creeped, then leaped to national attention, with “Soul Finger” hitting number three on the national R&B charts within two months, and a whopping number seventeen on the pop charts. This affirmation of their talent led to more after-school work for the boys, the kind that didn’t require shoe polish or carrying other stars’ clothes to the dry cleaners. “After the MG’s were getting really busy, I started filling in for Duck Dunn,” James says. “Duck wanted to be on the golf course, and he’d call me.” Other Bar-Kays also began to get studio experience. The family feeling was revivified: The kids had grown, a new generation was coming up.

  It had been a thrilling realization the previous year that the Beatles had wanted to come to Stax. It made all at the label aware of the range their radiance had reached. Now, in 1967, plans grew for the label to send a group of artists to England and across Europe. Many at Stax had never been outside Memphis’s Shelby County. Europe was a distant place that had been discussed briefly in geography classes long ago, where people spoke in languages that couldn’t be understood; they lived in castles and ate snails.

  The tour grew out of Otis’s previous visit abroad. Audience reception had been fantastic, and the visit’s problems were minor—Otis said the lemonade came syrupy and with small bubbles in it, and the food was weird, but the band found a fast-food chain with burgers recognizable enough to eat before each show. The promoters reached out to Phil Walden, Otis’s manager, to discuss a return, perhaps on a larger scale. Phil brought the idea to Jim, who discussed it with Al Bell. Otis had been planning a break from the road and he’d broken up his band; perhaps the MG’s could back him. Al liked big ideas, and in short order a Stax Revue was lined up: The MG’s would anchor as the house band, the horns would receive separate billing as the Mar-Keys, and the lineup would include Otis, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, and Carla Thomas, though she’d hav
e to depart early to fulfill some previously arranged US obligations. The bill also included Arthur Conley, a fellow Georgia artist that Otis had signed to a record label he was developing, an enterprise with Joe Galkin, Jotis Records (derived from the usual christening pattern, “Joe” and “Otis”). Conley broke big, going to number two on both Pop and R&B with “Sweet Soul Music,” penned and produced (at FAME Studio in Muscle Shoals) by Otis. William Bell, invited, was already committed to dates in the US. Rufus Thomas was not asked along, which he felt was unjust; Stax said the final lineup was dictated by EMI, their distributor abroad, who knew which artists would be popular. “Otis,” Al Bell says, “was opening doors for all of us at Stax.”

  Though the MG’s had recently gone onto salary at Stax, the horns had not, and they were still rushing from sessions to make their fifteen-dollar gigs. Wayne Jackson was working at Hernando’s Hideway, what he calls “a redneck joint,” alongside saxman Joe Arnold, who was also enlisted for Europe. They went to the club’s owner to arrange time off and he told them if they left, they couldn’t come back. “I really was worried about that, too,” says Wayne, “’cause I was working there seven nights a week and I needed that fifteen dollars.” But the lure of travel was too great; as far as they knew, they’d never get to Europe again. Fortunately, they quickly had no regrets: “That door closed and other doors opened,” says Wayne, “and we walked right on through, kept on going.”

  (Earlie Biles Collection)

  New thresholds beckoned the moment they disembarked. Crowds at the London airport were holding signs and cheering their arrival. The hubbub continued as they realized that the Beatles had sent their Bentley limousines to transport them from the airport to the hotel. “Maybe,” saxman Andrew Love remembers musing, “they like us over here.”