Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  “They were burning down the buildings next to us,” says Jim. “They burned the laundry across the street, all kinds of things, but by that time, people understood that we were a good effect on the community.”

  “When Martin Luther King was killed,” says Rufus Thomas, “that changed conditions in the whole world, and especially in Memphis. The death of Martin—the whole complexion of everything changed.”

  Windswept.

  Sideswiped.

  President Johnson sent James Reynolds, his undersecretary of labor for labor-management relations, as a special emissary to settle the strike, calling him often to find out why talks dragged on. Twelve more days passed, filled with sorrow and anger; humiliating and bitter days as the pharoah’s heart hardened. Reynolds finally negotiated for the dues checkoff to come indirectly from a federal credit union; he negotiated for Loeb to pass to the city council the task of recognizing the union, relieving him of the burden of responsibility, and also accountability. When the city balked at the last minute on the pay raises, an anonymous businessman donated $60,000 dedicated to their pay. On April 16, a memorandum of understanding was ratified between the two sides: The City of Memphis recognized the sanitation department employees as men. They recognized their union, gave them a written grievance procedure, agreed to end discrimination on the basis of race, and improved their working conditions. The terms were quickly ratified by the men inside the Clayborn Temple. T.O. Jones sat on the dais up front, and while others leaped in the air and shouted with joy, he leaned forward, his forehead cupped in his bent arm, weeping quietly.

  It was a resolution, but the future was uncertain. “That horrible occasion turned everything around,” says Wexler. “That was the end of rhythm and blues in the South.”

  “The heart has a lot to do with the success,” says Jim, “and I think the death of Otis took a lot of heart out of Stax. It was never quite the same afterwards. Then Dr. King was killed. I still love records and music, but that was just a pure time. We were such an emotional group, everybody was so involved. The company was the studio, and it was recording, and it was songs, everybody going to the control room and just going crazy with excitement. After that, something happened.”

  Less than a decade earlier, Jim Stewart had known no African-Americans on a personal basis. He’d had no success in the music business, save for gigs in smoky bars between night classes in law. He narrowly missed going under, rescued by his older sister. Since then, every victory had been hard won, every loss personal. But from their corner on McLemore, they’d reached the whole wide world.

  The death of Otis and the Bar-Kays dimmed their soul. The pillaging by Atlantic tore at their self-respect. The assassination of Martin Luther King choked their heart. In a state of shock, Stax was a body going cold.

  Part 2

  Independence

  16. “Soul Limbo”

  1968

  The assassin’s gunshot detonated an explosion nationwide. More than a hundred cities broke into riots—Chicago, Washington, DC, Detroit, Los Angeles. American blacks were daily reminded of the institutional bias against them—Kansas City, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Tallahassee, Raleigh, North Carolina—and the eruptions spread. For five days, from coast to coast, the anger ran rampant. There was arson, looting, and untold injuries. More than twenty thousand people were arrested; forty were killed. Many cities called out the National Guard. President Johnson ordered four thousand troops into the nation’s capital.

  In Memphis, the riot had occurred at Dr. King’s march the previous week. After the assassination, tanks that had just rolled out of Memphis were called back, positioning themselves on streets normally busy with automobiles. There was occasional unrest, some scattered fires and gunshots, but mostly the shock and awe produced a stunned silence. Blood from the minister of peace stained a Memphis balcony, and decades later stains the city still. Relations between the races in Memphis remain a festering wound, never quite scarred over, unable to fully heal.

  “After those losses, not only Dr. King but also Otis and the Bar-Kays,” says Jim Stewart, “it brings reality into focus, the reality of living together in this divided city. It was difficult for the employees, the African-Americans, for me. Relationships were stressed. What can I say to our people? It changed the company.”

  Memphis, late March 1968, before Dr. King was assassinated. (University of Memphis Libraries/Special Collections)

  At Stax, in the gloom of its three-way misery, Al Bell was struck by a thought. “What hit me with Dr. King’s death,” Al says, “was that it was time to start moving with economic empowerment.” The response to powerlessness, he realized, could be an assumption of power. Like the fighter rising from the mat, Al shook off the daze, felt the engines fire. “What I had in mind as a businessperson was to go into the marketplace with strength.” As a child, Al had worked for his father, landscaping, sent out with the burly workers to fell trees. “My father used to tell me, ‘Keep up,’ and he put me out there with the rest of the men. And if I didn’t keep up, I’d be reprimanded that evening when I got home. So this situation at Stax was just another battle for me.”

  In the years since Al’s stay with Dr. King in Georgia, a growing faction within the movement sought to bring strength back to the community by supporting locally owned businesses, enriching and empowering the people and places where one lived, instead of distant or absent landlords and owners. Support the neighborhood, and build out from there. The natural extension was locating leaders who could advocate for local needs in politics. The name given to this movement brought fear to the hearts of the established white leadership: Black Power. In 1966, SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in its first published statement on Black Power, defined the effort: “When the Negro community is able to control local office and negotiate with other groups from a position of organized strength, the possibility of meaningful political alliances on specific issues will be increased.” Further, they contrasted it with what it’s not: “SNCC proposes that it is now time for the black freedom movement to stop pandering to the fears and anxieties of the white middle class in the attempt to earn its ‘good-will,’ and to return to the ghetto to organize these communities to control themselves.”

  Stax, however unintentionally, had essentially done just that—tuned in to its immediate environment, lifting the neighborhood with itself. Though integrated and white-owned, Stax had become an example of Black Power’s potential. “Because of segregation,” says Al, “we African-Americans were doing what every other ethnic group had done in America: We had our own hotels, our own banks, our own insurance companies, and et cetera. And I recognized at an early age that that economic base is what caused others to be mainstreamed. Your Italian bankers dealt with Korean bankers and Chinese bankers and Greek bankers. If our banks had been allowed to grow, then we would have been able to relate to the other banks in this country. But that was cut off. We got programmed into saying, ‘Two, four, six, eight, we want to integrate.’ That stopped what progress we were making.”

  Al’s vision of a capitalized African-American populace could be realized at Stax. Stax had made music the third-largest industry in Memphis, generating $100 million in the local economy. “Forefront in my mind,” says Al, “was to take this natural resource that we have, which is music, and turn it into something that becomes an economic generator that enables us to build a power base.” Amid the fury and passion that roiled within his city and his own being, Al Bell was finding a way to create opportunity. “Otis was dead, Sam and Dave gone, our catalog was gone, and the industry was saying, ‘Stax Records is dead,’ and ‘It’s impossible for Stax to come back from that.’ Well, I refused to accept that. And I persuaded others that we could go forward from here.” He had experienced Atlantic Records release conferences, conventions of their wholesale distributors, “and I would watch Jerry Wexler, so eloquent, the passion, how he related to all of the music. It was personal with him.”

  Al conceived a huge
promotions event—the simultaneous release of about thirty albums and thirty singles to create an instant catalog. A sales conference that would draw the industry to Memphis. It could be so big it would run two weekends, not one. It could spawn a TV special. Cooking inside Al Bell was nothing less than an industry-wide soul explosion to premiere the new Stax Records. At the Atlantic conferences, “you would walk away with the feeling of Atlantic, who also distributed Atco, Stax, Volt, and all these other labels—as the premier independent record company. And they would sell several million dollars’ worth of product. I knew we had to present ourselves as viable and formidable with these independent wholesale buyers.” It would be high-tech, high-class, a clear statement that Stax, far from dead, was thinking grandly, spending lavishly, a key player in the music industry. Once it had some new recordings.

  “Al Bell is a very spiritual person, perhaps whose real calling was to be a minister,” says Rev. Jesse Jackson, who met Al in Memphis shortly after Dr. King’s assassination. “Al’s mantra is, ‘Let not your heart be troubled. No matter how difficult circumstances are, let not your heart be troubled.’ It is a way of saying that we have to be survivors. Al is a dream maker, an odds buster.”

  Dream maker. Not Dr. King’s dream, but Al Bell’s American dream: middle-class status for everyone. “To get from where I came from in Arkansas to where I was at that point in time,” says Al, “was a fight. Nothing but a constant fight.” He envisioned an expanding Stax Records. The more people it employed, the more who would rise from struggle to prosperity. A soul explosion would put the company back to work, would up the odds for a hit, would quickly establish catalog sales. But first, needing material fast, Al went to the vault; Atlantic owned everything they’d released, but not what was unreleased. He found a Booker T. & the MG’s track and gave it to Terry Manning, a young engineer at nearby Ardent Studios, where Stax would send its overflow work. Terry added marimbas to give it a new shine, an infectious effect leading to an appropriate title: “Soul Limbo.” Stax hired a sales manager, Ewell Roussell, who’d worked for the regional distributor of Stax, Atlantic, and other labels, and Roussell began assembling a sales force. They’d make this a hit.

  “We were angry,” says Jim Stewart, invigorated by Al and ready to prove himself to Wexler. “Those first records, we were so damn determined.” Released in May 1968 while Stax was still sorting out its future, “Soul Limbo” shot to the top-ten R&B, top-twenty pop, running arm in arm with the simultaneous Stax release of Eddie Floyd’s “I’ve Never Found a Girl” (featuring Booker’s gorgeous string arrangements), reaching number-two R&B and pop top forty. The pulse was strengtening.

  Studio A, 1968. L–R: James Alexander, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson (rear), Eddie Floyd (back to camera), Homer Banks, Booker T. Jones. (Photograph by Jonas Bernholm)

  These hits let Stax catch its breath and, before embarking on the soul explosion, it turned to a more immediate threat. Soulsville, the neighborhood around Stax, had changed with the riots. There’d always been an underlying poverty, but it was never as dominant as the sense of community that defined the place. Now that poverty was made manifest. After the March riots, many looted businesses did not reopen. Windows and doors were boarded up and stayed that way. Quietly, a fear crept through. What once bustled now felt busted. “We had to be more security conscious,” says Jim. “Up until that time, anybody could walk through our doors and we’d stop and listen. After the assassination, the community was totally disrupted. We had to increase security. I mean, this is not what the company is about.”

  While vandals had wreaked havoc on absentee landlords throughout Soulsville, they’d respected the Stax facility. But that symbol of pride became, to some, an isolated prosperity, and it provoked a smoldering resentment. One gang—a couple thugs really—saw the fancy cars and the big-name stars going in and out of 926. McLemore, and they wanted a piece of the profits. In the shadows of Dr. King’s murder, strong-arms fed on the undercurrent of trepidation, extorting small businessmen: Pay us to be protected—from us.

  These toughs monitored the parking lot across the street from Stax, and when musicians parked where they’d been parking for years, these thugs hassled and hustled, thieving even words from the legitimate movement. “For the cause,” they hissed. “The cause” implied a political purpose and a moral obligation, and instead of nickel-and-diming, the demands were higher. Ten bucks. Twenty. Your life. For the cause. Steve and Duck got hit, so did others. “I was threatened,” says Booker T. Jones. “People trying to extort money from me, threatening to kidnap me.” Threats continued, and the men began walking the ladies to their cars after work.

  The horn players bought small weapons, and others did too. “It got pretty intense around there,” says Duck. “Al sent me to West Memphis, Arkansas. I bought five thiry-eight pistols. He said, ‘Anybody gives you any shit, pull the trigger.’” (Duck adds quickly, “Shit, I didn’t shoot nobody. Well, I maybe ought to have, but I wouldn’t have the guts to do it. I’d probably get shot.”)

  “It was a continuous problem,” says Jim of the neighborhood antagonists. “I even went to the FBI. ‘Too bad’ was the way he put it. ‘You’re over there on McLemore Avenue, what are you doing over there anyway?’ That kind of mentality. So we decided, ‘Okay, if you’re not going to take care of the problem we’re going to have to take care of it ourselves.’”

  Stax brought in someone who was not uncomfortable with either end of a gun. He’d fire a pistol and stare at a gun barrel with equal equanimity. “Johnny Baylor was a New York street hustler,” says Jim. “We brought Johnny in, Al knew him from somewhere. He came in essentially as a security man.”

  “Johnny Baylor, firstly, was a very personal friend of mine, someone I knew long before he ever set foot in Memphis, Tennessee,” says Al, who would soon also carry a gun. They met when Al was starting his small label in Washington, DC. “Johnny came from Alabama, and moved at an early age with his family to Harlem in New York. Johnny defended himself on the streets, and in life. He was a boxer, he worked in Sugar Ray Robinson’s corner. Johnny was also involved in the recorded music business.”

  Johnny Baylor went bang when he entered a room. He wore fine suits, tailored. He cut clean and sharp as a blade. Baylor favored sunglasses. If you couldn’t see his eyes, you could feel them, the pupils shooting stilettos. One associate said, “Whenever he was in the room, you felt uncomfortable, and he cultured that. That was part of his weaponry.”

  Meet Johnny Baylor (right, sunglasses). Isaac Hayes is second from left. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  He’d served with the Rangers in the army, Special Ops, the cold killers. Regimentation suited his personality, and he mastered it, first in lockstep among the corps, later as a street capo. “You ever heard of the Black Mafia?” asks Randy Stewart, a boxer turned record promoter who would later work for Stax and knew Johnny from Sugar Ray Robinson’s Harlem barbershop. “Johnny Baylor come out of that territory. Johnny was a good person, but he didn’t take no shit. I saw those guys shooting guns down One-hundred-twenty-fifth Street. They were for real.”

  Baylor’s right-hand fist was Dino Woodard, a Memphis boy born and raised, who’d met Baylor through Sugar Ray Robinson. Sugar Ray, a champion boxer, was a Harlem hero and entrepreneur whose domain included a barbershop where boxers and musicians congregated, where Baylor learned to drink a daily cup of beef blood with a raw egg in it—to build strength. Dino, who’d come to New York in the radiant glow of Golden Gloves, wound up in the training ring with Ray, who was, Dino says simply, “the greatest fighter pound for pound.” Dino was a fighter who could keep Ray interested, who could take a beating and give one too. (“Dino was built like a wall,” says Duck.) Dino was slower than a champ, couldn’t read his opponent quickly enough, but he lumbered with awesome power out of the ring, he would be all smiles and fun until Johnny’s order came to flip the switch. Fun Dino gone, mean Dino here. Dino was also known by his favorite catchphrase—“Boom,” or the more c
omplex “Boom boom”—which, depending on its emphasis, its sentence placement, or the hand gestures that accompanied it, could have as many meanings as there are varieties of explosions. Dino made an excellent lieutenant in Baylor’s small army.

  When I get to heaven, St. Peter’s gonna say

  How’d you earn your living, how’d you earn your pay

  I will reply with a whole lot of anger

  Earned my pay as an Airborne Ranger

  Living my life full of danger

  “If you run into him in a fistfight or something like that,” says Dino of Baylor, “he would come out on top, because of his experience in the Rangers and knowing about ammunition. There were—there may have been some guns around. And we were fortunate, I guess, to keep from getting arrested. But how he would do it, boom, that’s another thing. He was just a good guy who really wanted African-Americans to be all right.” Johnny Baylor wanted no more compromises. He had high ideals and low—but effective—means to achieve them. Baylor was always on the attack, whether shaking hands with businessmen or threatening punks. Each moment of every day was about accruing and maintaining power.

  Baylor was invited to Memphis by Al’s valet, Mac Guy. Busy growing a company, Al hired Guy to help with the mundane activities: Mac drove Al’s kids to school, ran errands for him and his wife, Lydia, was a messenger for Al at the office. “Mac and I had a great relationship. And he was close with Johnny Baylor. So when Mac realized that these black guys on the street were threatening me at Stax,” says Al, “Mac called Johnny Baylor and the next thing I knew, Johnny Baylor was in Memphis and asking me, ‘Dick’—we called each other Dick—‘What’s going on, Dick?’ I was surprised to see him there.”

  The harassment problem could be solved quickly and easily by Johnny Baylor. But Baylor was a man who breathed control if he breathed at all, and having Johnny Baylor around to solve problems could, Al knew with the immediacy of Johnny’s presence, lead to new problems. Such, however, were the issues and the times. “Some want to make Stax appear, with Johnny Baylor moving into our environment, to be gangsters or something like that, because Johnny had a gun.” But the gun, Al points out, is an American institution, a tool employed often by the white majority. “I resist all that gangster talk, and in many instances it pisses me off, because in America, the gun is how European-Americans established a footprint and dominance in this country. The National Rifle Association is one of the most influential organizations in America. In the South, we’re not real southerners if we don’t have a shotgun, let alone the other weapons that we carry.”