Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  On Sunday, James Alexander and roadie Carl Sims dropped the band at the hangar. It was midday in Cleveland and cold. Ben Cauley remembers that Carl Cunningham asked for the plane to be turned on so the cabin could warm up. The attendant “told us he couldn’t crank it up because the battery was kind of low,” says Ben. “He said he’d rather have the pilot do it. We looked at each other, as young fellows do, and said, ‘The battery’s low?’ Five minutes after that it got started—but we were still thinking about that. Then we took off going to Madison with no problems.”

  There were no direct flights to Madison, so James and Carl caught a plane to Milwaukee. Otis’s pilot would shuttle them to Madison for the 6:30 gig, the first of two at the club that night. In Milwaukee, they waited, and they waited some more. “This was not like them,” says James. “We started calling around and calling around. We called the hangar and couldn’t find them. Two or three hours passed and we still didn’t know anything.”

  The private plane’s flight had gone smoothly enough that most of the guys were catching a nap. The pilot was given clearance to land at 3:25 P.M., four miles from Madison. Visibility was hampered by low cloud cover, dense at one hundred feet. “We were three minutes from landing,” says Ben Cauley, “and then it crashed. I remember waking up because I couldn’t breathe. The engines sounded real loud and I had a funny spinning sensation of falling through space. I thought the plane had hit an air pocket. [Saxman] Phalon was sitting next to me and said, ‘What’s that, man?’ And he looked out the window. Now, what he saw, I couldn’t tell you, but I do remember, he says, ‘Oh no.’ And I turned to say something to him, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t breathe. I unbuckled my seatbelt. I was going to tell them to do the same thing, but I wasn’t fast enough. I’m bumping around. Mentally, I wanted to tell them to. But I had done mine. This may have saved my life.”

  The low battery was affecting the instrument panel and perhaps the engines, while the pilot’s judgment was hampered by the clouds and his inexperience in cold weather, the temperature intensified by the bitter lake below. A Lake Monona resident heard the peculiar engine sound, so loud and low, and stepped outside to see the plane appear through the cloud cover—and and dive headlong into the water. He called authorities. They would arrive in seventeen minutes. Upon impact, the plane’s fuselage ripped open, ejecting Cauley and the others.

  Otis was seated in the front, next to the pilot. He’d become an airplane enthusiast, and after some informal training, the pilot sometimes let him fly. But he’d stayed up late with the other guys, and he was also taking a nap. “Otis was sitting directly in front of me in the copilot’s seat,” Ben continues. “I didn’t hear him say a word. Didn’t see him do a thing. The next thing I remember is bobbing up in the water holding onto this cushion. I was on top of all this water. And then I saw Phalon coming up after me, and Ronnie, and some of the cats come up—Carl [Cunningham], I saw Carl. And I said, ‘What in the world are we doing?’ At that time, my mind was really fogged up. And the only thing I could think was, We’re in the wrong place. We’re in the wrong place. I’ll never forget that.

  “I was in the water about a good twenty minutes. And I was cold out there. I had on my winter shoes and I remember my right shoe was on. And I had my trench coat on. And, I was bleeding in my head, I didn’t realize that. And I was cold. I was shaking. I saw little bits of ice floating around in the water.

  “I was the only one who couldn’t swim. I was holding the airplane seat in my hand. Do you know, I lost it in the water, the airplane seat? I saw Ronnie come out. I’ll never forget that. Ronnie came up and he was hollering for help. And I was saying, ‘Ronnie, hold on man. I’m trying to get over to you.’ I was trying to get to him, and the more I tried to get to him, this airplane seat was slipping out my hand. And then finally, it slipped out of my hand and at that point, I said, ‘Oh no.’ I knew I was next because I didn’t have nothing, and then another seat cushion came straight to me.

  The fateful Friday, December 8, 1967. As the Bar-Kays prepare to leave Memphis for what will be their final tour, drummer Carl Cunningham (far left) laughs with neighborhood friends. One carries his gig clothes, dry cleaned. (Photograph by Don Nix/Courtesy of the Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture, Steve Todoroff Collection)

  “I saw Carl come out of the water. He didn’t say anything. I saw [Otis’s valet] Matt come up on the other side. And then, for a while, nobody was there. They had floated away or drowned. And, I felt like—I knew I was next.” Cauley remembers that he’d begun slipping into the water, fighting to stay afloat, the chaotic and panicked efforts of a drowning man. “I laid there one time and then I came back up and said, ‘I’m all right.’” He’d been in the water for seventeen minutes, his body moments from severe hypothermia, and when he felt like he was going down for the last time, “Someone just lifted me up. When they got me aboard the boat, I couldn’t talk at all. I saw them bringing the others in and that’s when I stopped talking. When they got Jimmy—just think about it, what I saw. I tightened up. I could not talk. I said, ‘What is this?’ But I couldn’t talk.” The images in his head are dreamlike, a nightmare of confusion and shock. “There was this thing over all our heads, including me too. They didn’t want me to see what really had happened. And I was trying to get to them to help them, to see if everything was all right. And they just kept constantly pushing me back down, told me to lay down. ‘Are you all right?’ And I said, ‘I’m all right.’”

  Ben, husband and father to a nine-month-old, was taken to a hospital. “I remember the coroner told the nurse and two of the doctors to stay around my bedside because I was in shock. I didn’t know what shock was. But I knew how I was feeling. I couldn’t talk. And I was scared because Jimmy and them was gone. And when I came back around, I realized what really happened to me.” What really happened was that the dead bodies of guitarist Jimmy King and pilot Dick Fraser had been pulled from the lake, and there was a frantic search for the others as nightfall closed in. He remembers, “I kept asking, ‘Are they all right?’ And this guy just looked at me and said, ‘Well, son, you’re the only one alive.’ Once he said that, I couldn’t talk. I’d never been that way before in my life. I was shaking all over.”

  James Alexander and Carl Sims were still waiting for their ride to the gig. “Then some authorities came to Milwaukee to pick us up,” says James, “and they said, ‘The plane went down.’ They didn’t have any details other than the plane had gone down.” Slowly, more information came in. First they were told that everyone had died, and then later that Ben had survived. “We got to Madison, we went to talk to—to see Ben in the hospital and he was in a state of shock. He was just laying there with his eyes open. He didn’t really know he was there at that point.”

  James Alexander, seventeen years old, had the grisly task of identifying the bodies. “I was numb,” he says. “That Sunday night, late, we identified two people. Just a strange thing to do, especially when all these guys were your friends and you grew up with them, and then here you have to go and identify them in a morgue. That’s tough.”

  Jim Stewart got a call that Sunday evening from Joe Galkin, the traveling promotions man who’d brought Otis to his attention a short five and a half years earlier. Galkin told him to turn on the television, and Jim absorbed the news with the rest of the world. He remembered that last session, and an unusual feeling he’d had. “I had gone to my office,” Jim says, “and I knew Otis was getting ready to leave. I had the feeling that I must tell Otis good-bye. I had never felt that way before. Otis would come in and everything would be hectic and then he’d leave and I’d never think anything about it. I don’t know if you believe in premonitions, but if you listen to the lyrics on ‘Dock of the Bay,’ it’s kind of scary if you relate that to the events that happened. And I was never able to say good-bye.”

  The MG’s were trapped by the weather in the Indianapolis airport. “We had missed our connection,” Steve remembers. “There was an icy runway. And I know
we made the comment that if we could get a hold of Otis’s pilot, he’d come get us out of here. David Porter called home to let his wife know. We didn’t all want to spend the same dime, so he was going to ask his wife to call our wives. And he came back, just—‘What’s wrong?’ And he’d just found out. His wife heard on the radio that Otis’s plane had gone down.”

  “We had just come from a wedding of one of our very good friends,” says Carla Thomas. “We had gotten home and we were jiving and joking about it. And we just happened to turn on the TV, and we were in this elated mood. And then they said, ‘Bulletin.’ Just, boom. ‘Plane belonging to Otis Redding . . .’ And I knew that the kids were with him. They were traveling together. And, what I did? I just put my hands in my ear. I didn’t even hear the rest of it. Mother and I were in there together, so after the bulletin went off, I looked at her. She looked at me. And I said, ‘What did they say?’ I wanted to get it secondhand. And then she told me.”

  “I was in the kitchen, the phone rang,” says Wayne Jackson. It was his horn partner, Andrew Love, calling. “He said, ‘Did you hear about Otis?’ When you hear those words, you know something really bad’s happened. I said, ‘No. I hadn’t been listening to the radio today.’ And he said, ‘They’re all gone.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, “gone”?’ He said, ‘They’re gone. They all went in the lake up in Wisconsin.’ And we stood there, just silence, nothing but static in the air.”

  Silence. Static. “And that’s the way I thought my life would be with no Otis in it. He was such a predominant force in our lives and we’d learned so much about being energetic and having a great time, the joy that you feel playing music with him. It was really hard to get a hold of the fact that he was gone and would never be back.”

  Jimmy King, age eighteen. Guitarist.

  Carl Cunningham, age eighteen. Drummer.

  Phalon Jones, age nineteen. Saxophonist.

  Ronnie Caldwell, age nineteen. Organist.

  Matthew Kelly, age seventeen. Valet.

  Richard Fraser, age twenty-six. Pilot.

  Otis Redding, age twenty-six. Star.

  Such a tragedy brings out the crass essence of a commercial enterprise like a record label. Steve remembers, “We got a call from Atlantic saying, ‘We’ve got to rush something out immediately. What have you got?’ And I immediately said, ‘We need to put our hit out.’ The difficulty was not the fact that it had to be done real quick. The difficulty was—they hadn’t even found Otis’s body yet.” Cropper threw himself into the project, a way to block all other thoughts from his mind. He added electric guitar, seagulls, and the sound of waves. He went in early and mixed all night. “I handed it to a flight attendant, who flew it to New York and handed it to a representative from Atlantic. Trying to work on something like that when you don’t even know where one of your closest friends is is difficult.”

  Otis’s body wasn’t found until later on Monday, when Carl Cunningham was also retrieved. The ongoing search was hampered by the chill of the water. “Police skin divers said they were unable to remain in the 30–40 degree water longer than fifteen minutes at maximum,” Sepia magazine reported. When Otis was brought up, he was still buckled into his seat, his eyes closed. “He looked,” said a witness, “as if he was taking a nap.” Four thousand five hundred people overflowed the Macon Municipal Auditorium’s three thousand seats for Otis’s funeral. The hour-long service was quiet and solemn. Joe Simon sang “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross,” and midway through, Zelma broke down, wailing and stamping her feet in sorrow. Decorum was broken only when James Brown exited the building, mobbed by teenagers who pounced on his car; when it tried to follow the hearse, their weight caused the tires to spin, blue smoke rising. Otis was buried at the Big O Ranch, in view of his kitchen window.

  The funerals for Cunningham, King, and Kelly were held together on Sunday the seventeenth, a week after the crash. Aptly, a heavy rain descended from a gloomy Memphis sky. Nearly three thousand mourners filled Clayborn Temple AME Church, and the speakers included Estelle Axton and the principal of Booker T. Washington High School who said, “We are witnessing a phenomenon of life, in which the evening sun of their lives has gone down while it is still morning.” During the service, word spread that divers had just found Phalon Jones. The line of cars leading to the cemetery ran over a mile long. The four African-American Bar-Kays are buried alongside each other at New Park Cemetery. Ronnie Caldwell, whose body was not recovered until Wednesday, was buried on the twenty-second in a family plot.

  “That next week I went to Stax,” says Cauley, where a wreath of white carnations hung on the door. “It was like going back home, because we put so much into Stax. It was part of us. We used to sit on the floor many nights and practice, rehearse and play shows together. And Miz Axton was there with us. Miz Axton was like our mama. The Bar-Kays could do no wrong because of Miz Axton. She came in and hugged me.”

  “Otis was not only an artist, he was a dear friend,” says Jim. “He stayed at my home many times when he would come to town. It was a great loss, so much talent that we never got to explore. He was just beginning.”

  “Everybody was walking around staring at their feet for two months after that,” says Marvell Thomas. “There was true sadness at that place. I didn’t know Otis nearly as well as a lot of the other people did, but I certainly felt his loss. You would walk in the door—Stax was usually a happy, peppy place, there was conversations in the hallways and songwriters over here and a demo going—that all stopped. It was quiet like a mausoleum. Everybody was very sad and very introspective. And strictly from a business standpoint, Stax Records lost its biggest act. So they felt it psychologically, emotionally, and in their pocketbook.”

  “About a month or two after the plane crash,” remembers Don Nix, “here comes a UPS truck with all these boxes. They were all warped and somebody come dumped them in the lobby. It was Carl’s drums. They’d been at the bottom of that lake all that time. And everybody just sighed. We were getting over it, and I remember how that made me feel. ’Cause everyone was friends—a neighborhood. It was guys that cared about each other.”

  15. “Born Under a Bad Sign”

  1968

  After the loss of someone close, we seek solace in the familiar, comfort among others with whom we share similar bonds. Routine actions, longtime friends—the heightened appreciation for the mundane—these come into high relief. Assessing its new, bleaker world, Stax sought the balm of the ordinary but found instead yet more encroaching change.

  Stax Records was an independent record company, its home in Memphis, its owners and staff in the same building as the studio, as the mailing room, as the retail record store. But to get the records into the stores, Stax was under the Atlantic Records umbrella. Stax found the talent and made the recordings, shipping the master tapes to New York; there, Atlantic pressed and distributed the recordings, keeping the lion’s share for its expenses and its effort, paying a royalty to Stax. Atlantic was older and larger than Stax and the other independents it had similar deals with; it had earlier faced the same retail problem, and it conquered that by creating a distribution network: If stores could come to Atlantic and order not only Atlantic’s product but also those of other independent record labels—Dial with hitmaker Joe Tex; T-Neck with the Isley Brothers; Moonglow with the Righteous Brothers—then the smaller labels could have a shot at competing with Warner Bros., with Columbia, with RCA. Stax, then, was its own entity, but its arms and reach were through its association with Atlantic.

  By the middle of the 1960s, the business world in America was rumbling toward conglomerates. Big corporations were buying big companies to become more massive, making it harder for the independent companies to find sunlight and grow. Warner Bros. had just been purchased by Seven Arts, and the new company (that would soon sell to a corporation built from New Jersey’s commercial parking lots) was buying Atlantic Records for breakfast. Offered $17.5 million in late 1967, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun couldn’t resist sel
ling. And as part of the deal, they would continue to run the company. From out of the sky fell a little piece of heaven.

  But their nirvana was another’s hell. First Stax negotiated with Atlantic. Jim, Estelle, and Al even flew to New York to discuss joining Atlantic in the Warner deal. “What Jerry offered me was an insult for the company,” says Jim. “We were supplying Atlantic with a lot of hit records. A lot of hits. We were a big portion of their 1967 sales. That’s why I was totally astounded when they came to me with some ridiculous offer.” Jerry had become a mentor to Jim, making the situation that much harder for Jim to accept. “I took it as a personal thing. You realize how many millions of dollars we’ve run through that company since 1960. Seven years, and their total outlay of money from 1960 through ’67, their cost to get that deal, was five thousand dollars. From there on they never had one penny invested, not even in production costs. They were using our money all during that period of time.”

  Jim went to Warner Bros. directly, but the offers were still meager, and he’d have been foolish to accept them. Fortunately, Jim had an escape: At Jim’s request, the 1965 contract had a key-man clause. That meant that Jim trusted Wexler, and if ever Wexler divested his Atlantic stock, Jim could choose to terminate the relationship. The sale to Warner triggered the key-man clause, and Jim—with Estelle and input from Al Bell and other key figures—had six months to find a new company to ally with.

  And then more bad news came in. “Of course, there was a contract,” says Wexler, quickly adding, “and it turned out that there was a clause whereby we owned the masters.”

  A “clause whereby we owned the masters” meant that Stax owned nothing. It meant that all right, title, and interest in the records belonged to Atlantic, including any rights of reproduction, with Stax having no ownership, no control, and due only about a 15 percent royalty. It meant that Atlantic owned everything that it distributed for Stax—even though it said “Stax” on the label, even though Stax had paid all the money associated with those recordings and Atlantic had paid none and was at risk for not a single penny, and even though Jim and Estelle had operated for years believing their work was their own. Suddenly they were tenants of their destiny; they were sharecroppers, with nothing to show for their labor but a promise. The contract that Jim signed in 1965, formalizing the handshake, actually did not formalize the handshake but rather it slipped handcuffs on him, establishing an entirely new relationship, a very good one for Atlantic and a very bad one for Stax.