“It was for service,” Jim says of the financial rearrangment, “work well done. It wasn’t a gift.”
“That turned Al Bell against me,” Estelle continues. “Al Bell had by this time gotten in so tight with the blacks, you could see division—both in the company and outside. I could feel it and could see it, how he would have meetings with some of the blacks and no white was allowed, and this had begun to build up. After Gulf & Western came in, Stax became a conglomerate. Jim and Al were going to get a salary, seventy-five thousand dollars apiece, and they weren’t going to give me anything. I said, ‘This is not going to work. All this stock I’m going to get, I can’t sell them for a term, so what am I going to live on?’ I demanded twenty-five thousand dollars a year. And to this day I’m sorry I didn’t ask for fifty.”
He’d helped land the deal, and power shifted to Al from Estelle. “Instead of being a creative world that we lived in with great songs, great music, camaraderie and all of that, the outside business world trickled into Stax,” says Al. Then, summoning a complacent chivalry, he continues, “And as days would pass, I remember it having a really profound effect on Miz Axton’s attitude and her spirit. We’re talking about major Wall Street corporations and how their decisions and their thinking impacted with us and interfered, and in some instances, prohibited us from doing the things that Miz Axton and Jim enjoyed the most about this business, which was the creative aspect. And she really wanted out from under that. So we made arrangements to buy Mrs. Estelle Axton’s interest, which would allow her to do whatever it is she chose to do with the rest of her life. It’d just gotten to a point where it wasn’t fun to her anymore.”
Jim found himself caught between his sister and his partner. “I had a decision to make,” says Jim, “a very hard decision to make. It involved family versus the company—a very hard choice. Al and my sister did not get along and it had gotten to the point where Al was ready to leave. In the end I made the decision that more people’s livelihoods were at stake than just mine and asked my sister to step down.”
Estelle had risked her home for the company (essentially also risking her marriage) and had as much heart, muscle, and love in the place as anyone. Her commitment was beyond question, and however anyone wanted to frame her departure, she damn sure wasn’t going to fold her cards and walk away, was not going to assume the role of the powerless woman. So each side lawyered up. Jim hired Seymour Rosenberg, the trumpet-playing attorney whom he’d first encountered when Chips Moman sued him for royalties after leaving Stax. “Jim told me one time that he didn’t like me,” laughs Rosenberg, “and that the only reason he wanted me to be his lawyer was he didn’t want me on the other side. I took it as a compliment.”
Talks dragged on until the summer of 1969, and finally all parties hunkered down in a suite in the Holiday Inn Rivermont, the city’s finest hotel. There were two bedrooms connected by a living room, Jim and his lawyer to one side, Estelle and hers to the other. Representatives from the conglomerate occupied the neutral ground. “We had a big bar in the main room and the Gulf & Western people stayed there and had drinks,” explains Rosenberg. “We went back and forth and back and forth and I said, ‘We’re gonna stay here till we make a deal.’” When the smoke cleared, Al Bell and Jim were partners, and Lady A was to receive, according to the July 17, 1969, Redistribution of Earn-Out Agreement, “$490,000 to be paid at the rate of ninety percent of the first debentures used under said agreement until the total amount is reached.” She was a wealthy woman who proceeded to sink her buyout money into a large apartment complex that served her well, and she also collected a $25,000 annual salary for the next five years; in return, she signed a five-year non-compete agreement.
Estelle Axton, May 1968. (Commercial Appeal/Photograph by Jim McKnight)
“I decided to take my money and run,” she says. “But I had to wait five years before I could get back in. I couldn’t have a record shop, I couldn’t have anything that had to do with music.”
There was no grand crescendo, no weepy string arrangement as Lady A made for the door. She had only good wishes for all the friends she was leaving behind, and could exit knowing she’d ignited the sparks that burned so brightly throughout that building. She’d affected the course of American popular music, could point to lasting hits that wouldn’t have existed but for her. Lives had been changed because of her work—hers, her brother’s, her son’s, a real family affair. Purse on her arm, smartly dressed and with a Parliament cigarette between her fingers, her head was held high as she exited the company she’d helped make.
“Estelle was an inspirer,” says Booker. “She had a great sense of humor. She just loved music, loved people. She was always bringing us up there, having us listen to records. She kept us in touch with the music industry. I doubt if there would have ever been a Stax Records without Estelle Axton. She encouraged the entire Stax roster from her little perch behind the counter. She could’ve just as well been sitting in Las Vegas winning a jackpot to see the joy on her face when we made records.”
“Estelle Axton mentored all of us, and encouraged us to pursue our dreams, our professional wishes,” says Deanie Parker. “She was an unusual woman, a natural entrepreneur. She didn’t have formal training in marketing, in sales, or in promotion, but she had more common sense than twenty people put together. She was thinking and operating very professionally—a woman in a man’s world, a white man’s world.”
She’d done more than pick hits. A nurturer, she’d fostered a sense of family, even organizing care packages for Stax employees serving in Vietnam. William C. Brown, John Gary Williams, William Bell, and others all said that those packages fired their spirits, kept them connected with a distant place close to their hearts. “When she left, we were begging her to come back,” says William Bell. “‘Oh, no, our mother has left!’ When the artists were down, she could talk you back. You’d come to the record shop when you couldn’t get a song right and she’d say, ‘It’s going to be all right, just go back and do this and do that.’ And it was like magic. And when she left, the magic was gone. Many artists said, ‘This building will never be the same,’ and it was never the same again.”
19. The Soul Explosion
1968–1969
Al Bell rolled up his sleeves. “Hit records are the number one thing on our list,” he said in a magazine article at the time. “Soul music has grown from a particular market to become the new music of the nation,” and he set about making “product [that] is appealing to and accepted by the masses in America.”
Jim Stewart was fully on board with Al’s vision. “This is a corporate change,” Jim explained. “We are certainly proud of our R&B background . . . but now we will merchandise to the mass market. The racks [department stores and drug stores that had racks in a particular area devoted to records] historically have been hesitant to put out ‘black product’ . . . Finally they began realizing they were losing sales.”
Through music, and through the company behind the music, Al could realize the essence of the Black Power platform. Stax could appeal to all people of all races in all places, and bring more jobs—good jobs, high-paying jobs—back home. But he needed a catalog. “I wanted to get as many hit records as possible into the marketplace,” says Al. “Then, we’d bring all of these distributors in and let them know that we are a formidable, independent record company. And the window of time to get this done was just a few months. They said that can’t be done, it’s impossible. So I got together with Steve Cropper and Isaac Hayes, [producer] Rick Hall and the guys in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Don Davis and his studio in Detroit, and we had productions going on in all of those places at the same time. And I was busy, back and forth on the phone, pumping everybody up and just driving, driving, driving.”
Al’s visionary soul explosion could be made a reality. One compilation album even took that name, Soul Explosion, and the 1969 sales conference, though unnamed, has become known to many as just that: the soul explosion. Thirty singles would
accompany what became twenty-eight albums, all created in about eight months. Al Bell signed jazz greats Sonny Stitt and Maynard Ferguson and was seeking a fresh comedian. The studio upgraded its recorder to an eight-track. That made room to establish Studio B, smaller than the A room and using the older gear—but busy. Soon, a C studio was built near the publishing office, a demo studio for writers. There was so much traffic and demand that a chalkboard was put outside of studio A to reserve time, and the three rooms were booked all hours of the day, all days of the week.
Stax took over the whole block of buildings. The staff had rapidly expanded: The sales force included Herb Kole, who brought nearly two decades of experience, including a stint as Atlantic’s East Coast sales manager. Bernard Roberson, an African-American, was named national R&B promotions director, and other promotions men were hired. A New York publicity firm was retained to work with Deanie Parker; New York lawyers were hired, and so were California graphic artists. “They’d knock all the walls out,” says Don Nix, “and they’d rebuilt. It was just one big maze of offices and hallways.”
“Stax was an architectural nightmare,” recalls one visitor, who was buzzed in from the lobby, which was decorated in lavender and purple. “The lavender carpeting instantly changed to deep, deep green. I’d never seen such a clash in my life, until we walked down the hall, and the carpeting suddenly changed to bright red. The color scheme at Stax was shocking.”
The company’s fresh start was emblematized by a new logo. The stack of spinning records had worn thin, and Al and Jim had discussions with Paramount’s art department about an emblem to indicate their new direction, their return to the game, their instant catalog. Paramount delivered: the snapping fingers. “The finger snap signaled a change,” says Al. “Pow. This was the company that’s moving.”
When working the deal between Stax and Gulf & Western, Al had not been shy about his needs. “In addition to getting stock in the sale,” he explains, “we had budgets to operate the company. They understood the need, from a business standpoint, of having a catalog. Built in to those budgets was the cost for putting together that sales presentation.”
“What Al Bell did was to galvanize the creative force of that organization,” reflects Deanie Parker. “He had the writers writing. He had the producers producing back-to-back marathon recording sessions. Of course Jim was a part of it, but Al Bell was the motivating factor. It was like a tornado. I’m serious—like a tornado. We all had a common goal and that was the restoration of that organization.”
“It was somewhat contradictory to my spending philosophy up to that point,” says Jim. “But I’d had a rude awakening when we terminated with Atlantic Records. It’s not a bed of roses out here. Survival is the word. You’ve got to take a stand, and make your presence felt in the industry.”
The soul explosion included a foundational change in emphasis. Stax releases through the Atlantic years had relied on the MG’s, which gave a consistency to the label’s sound, an identity. A Stax release could usually be identified with just a few seconds of play; the music was always unique to the song, but it had readily identifiable characteristics and feel.
No more. The new Stax sound was the sound of hits, whether recorded at McLemore or a foreign land, whether produced by Stax or simply licensed by them for distribution and made by people in other cities that no one at Stax had ever met. If the song appealed to Al’s DJ instincts, Stax wanted it. What Stax sought was no longer about identity, it was about opportunity.
The rush of work kept Jim too busy to engineer sessions, so Ron Capone was hired away from another studio to oversee production. Shocked by how fast and loose the work was being done, he quickly recognized the shortage of production staff. Others were hired and Capone organized weekly Saturday-morning training sessions, designed not only to give a chance for improvement to employees like William Brown from the mail room and night watchman Henry Bush (each of whom would soon engineer hits), but also to establish a sense of basic standards for all the sessions produced at Stax.
Duck Dunn remembers being swept up in the moment. “Al Bell missed his calling,” smiles Duck. “He should have been a preacher. He could put you in the palm of his hand. He did it to me, he did it to everyone. I mean, the man was incredible: ‘Lord gonna bless you.’ Al Bell became God in rhythm and blues. He said, ‘We’re gonna take this company, and we’re gonna turn it into a multimillion-dollar thing.’ And he did it. With Jim.”
“The timing was perfect,” says Deanie. “Jim needed an Al Bell. Stax Records needed an Al Bell. So Al had a series of meetings and he explained what the situation was—how we’d lost our catalog but we’re gonna move on and it’s gonna be bigger and it’s gonna be better than it was when we first started. And we were all young and naïve and energetic, and certainly our love for Stax Records was unquestionable, so we said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
In concept, the soul explosion idea was brilliant. In execution, however, the effort was almost brutal. The “factory” was going to up its output by more than tenfold. “The market was changing toward albums,” says Steve. “Where we would spend months working on four, five, six artists and singles trying to get a hit on them, all of a sudden I’m working on four, five, six albums—ten times as much. The fatigue of the in-house songwriters, producers, and players trying to keep up with the demand was just overwhelming. It was wearing us out.”
Combined with the increased workload was a new system of office procedures dictated by the distant corporate headquarters. New York instructed Los Angeles to instruct Memphis: time management, product quotas, and the like. “I didn’t like the new situation,” says Booker. “We were getting memos as to what time to have the sessions and at one point they had us operating in shifts. That whole concept was so foreign to me. Three shifts with Stax? We started as a company that had trouble getting the drummer to the studio by noon. It wasn’t the same company. It wasn’t the same at all.” This malaise that Booker felt from the conditions was also expressed in the art. “There was an absence of the spirit in the music,” he continues. “The music was coming from a different place. There was a feeling like mass production, a factory or assembly line feeling. I think the arrangements lost their sensitivity.”
“The profit and the amount of record sales increased greatly,” says Steve. “The record company had a lot of hits and a lot of chart action. But I think the quality started deteriorating. And a lot of records had been farmed out to other studios, to other producers, to other musicians that didn’t have the Stax seal of approval. It’s like a great shirt company farming out to some other country to make their shirts and they wear out after three weeks. They’re not the same shirt anymore.”
As the engine revved higher in preparation for the soul explosion, the company released a steady stream of singles, many of which sold well and landed on the charts. Jimmy Hughes stole away from Muscle Shoals and, under the guidance of Al Jackson, he hit with “I Like Everything About You.” Linda Lyndell put the sultry “What a Man” on the charts, the Mad Lads (also produced by Al Jackson) hit with “So Nice,” and the Soul Children’s debut, “Give ’Em Love,” placed well. (Isaac and David created the Soul Children to replace Sam and Dave, using two men and two women to create high-energy songs.) William Bell and Booker T. Jones wrote “Private Number” for vocalist Judy Clay, and Bell’s demo was so good it wound up as a duet with her, made all the more lush by Jones’s restrained guitar playing and his beautiful string arrangement. “Private Number” is classic soul timelessly updated; if there’s less raw funk and juke-joint dirt floor, it is a song built on that same foundation. William Bell was certainly on a roll, releasing three more singles before the sales meeting, all of which landed on the charts, including another duet with Clay.
Money kept coming in, and Stax had no problem spending it. With the vast building to fill, the six vice presidents—each of the MG’s and Hayes and Porter—got their own offices. There was an expanded space for the publishing company. Jim and Al
each redecorated their offices. Jim’s looked like the Memphis retreat for Playboy’s Hugh Hefner. He put in slick wood paneling, sleek modern furniture, a TV set built into the wall. Would you like a drink? Step over to the leopard-skin bar and feast your eyes on the sumptuous supine woman in the black velvet painting while the highballs are shaken. His former bank loan customers would have been amazed that this hepster dwelled inside the straitlaced man who’d sat across the loan desk from them. Al Bell’s office was upstairs—the old projection room. “We called it ‘the bird’s nest,’” says the Bar-Kays’ new drummer, Willie Hall. “You go up these steps, a little narrow hall, and it was this little room with a great stereo system, some great speakers, a tape machine to play what you’d just recorded. You go in there man, and Al, he’d be up dancing, and he’d say, ‘Have you heard this? Let me show you this. You got to hear this.’ He would put on songs from Stevie Wonder or the Jackson Five and he would encourage us to try to get those type of productive ideas and production feels. Every time you saw Al, he was moving at a hundred plus.”
Al moved into a large house on the city’s prominent North Parkway thoroughfare. Steve bought a house in the expanding eastern suburbs (his doorbell played “Green Onions”). Jim spent nearly a quarter million dollars on a new home, ten thousand square feet sitting on more than fifty acres, just outside Memphis. He installed four swimming pools, a tennis court, a bathhouse, a party house, and a guesthouse. In December 1968, he threw a lavish Christmas party there. “He had this house that I could not believe,” says Don Nix, who remembered the Jim Stewart who had squeezed all the manual labor from the hapless Mar-Keys when they were building the studio. “Janis Joplin was there. They had a trout stream running through the living room. I said, ‘Look at ole Jim. He’s having himself a good time,’ and I was glad to see it.”
Respect Yourself Page 26
