Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Stax Fax was a magazine that Al delegated to Deanie Parker in the autumn of 1968, directed toward both industry personnel and the popular audience. Filled with pictures, it kept Stax on the coffee table when it wasn’t on the turntable, and it quickly grew into a glossy format that included news stories germane to the contemporary African-American audience, opinion columns, and profiles on Stax artists and others, like Nina Simone and Florence Ballard, who were not associated with the label.

  Busy with these big plans, Al needed an executive assistant, which he found in the African-American applicant Earlie Biles. She’d had training in secretarial science but knew nothing about the music business. “I was sitting there waiting,” she says of her job interview, “and in comes Isaac Hayes—with no shirt, some thongs, and some orange-and-purple shorts. He was the first baldheaded black man I’d ever seen. I was introduced to Johnny Baylor as a producer. He looked like the typical gangster you saw on television. He was kind of scary to me. Dino came in with him, and he was the second person I saw with a bald head. But Johnny was very nice to me—except one time. I stood up from my desk to greet him and he touched my leg. I slapped him, and then I got really scared because I realized I slapped this—what looked like a thug. He said, ‘Woo.’ And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He said, ‘Okay, okay.’ And then a couple of weeks went by and he asked me to keep his gun for him. He wore kind of tight pants, and a short leather jacket, so I guess he couldn’t hide his gun. I don’t like guns, but I allowed him to put his gun in my drawer every time he came. And I learned to live with that.” Earlie was twenty-one years old.

  Earlie Biles came to Stax in 1968. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  The feel and smell of success that permeated the new Stax was buttressed by the company’s friendly relations with its loan officer, Joe Harwell, who’d been working at the nearby branch of Union Planters National Bank since 1966. In the era of flower power and the burgeoning hippie movement, Joe was not your average straitlaced banker; not that he wore bell-bottoms and long hair, but he was comfortable around musicians and those whom mainstream society considered oddballs. “Mr. Harwell always did nice things for all the artists who would come in town,” says Earlie. “Johnnie Taylor or Don Davis, if they had no ID and needed checks cashed, I would just phone Joe Harwell.’ He supported all the Stax personnel very well.”

  “Joe was this personable guy that would be right at home on a used car lot,” says one Stax employee. “He became a star at Union Planters. He would loan Stax a lot of money, and Stax would pay it back, and Harwell looked good. Whenever Stax needed money, he was ready for us.”

  “I’d get on the phone to Joe Harwell,” says Duck. “‘Hey, it’s Duck. I’d like to buy my wife a car.’ Joe Harwell, he was so sweet. ‘What kind of car you want?’ ‘Cadillac!’ ‘You work for Stax? Okay, it’s done.’”

  With friends like Joe Harwell, everyone could dress well, live in a nice home, and furnish it in the fashion of the day, driving to work in the car of their dreams. The songwriters for “Who’s Making Love” drove matching canary-yellow Cadillacs with black roofs. Al Jackson drove a blue Lincoln Continental Mark III. Steve was in a purple Buick Riviera (among other cars). Duck had a custom yellow Excalibur. The newly fenced parking area outside McLemore looked like a million-dollar car lot, a bouquet of gas-guzzling success.

  Keyboardist Steve Leigh, then known as Sandy Kay, came to Stax in 1969 from New York, where he’d been playing with a group named the Soul Survivors. “Raymond Jackson [songwriter on ‘Who’s Making Love’] brought me over to see Joe Harwell, and I opened a bank account at Union Planters Bank on Bellevue,” he recalls. “Then Raymond brought me to a furniture store in Memphis, and with no more than his say-so, I had enough instant credit to buy thousands of dollars of furniture for the townhouse we rented. ‘You work at Stax?’ Presto! Credit! Just like that. The next day, all the furniture was delivered . . . A super king-size bed with the tufted velvet headboard and matching tufted velvet bench. It was exactly like Raymond’s, but ours was blue and Raymond’s was purple. Homer [Banks] had one, and Al Jackson did, too.”

  It was boom time. “The city opened itself up to us,” says Willie Hall.

  “You could borrow money if you wanted it,” says Earlie. “Joe Harwell, he was the fix-it-all for everybody.” By the time the soul explosion rolled around, everyone was living large.

  If the soul exploding sales conference had been a symphony, it would have been Beethoven’s Ninth. It was a huge and glorious effort, interweaving the grand themes of salesmanship, civic responsibility, and the recording arts. It employed live performances, recordings, speeches, and a high-tech multiscreen slide show presentation with synchronized music. The future of Stax was riding on the success of the event. Its theme was, appropriately, “Gettin’ It All Together.” Had it failed, Gulf & Western would be hard-pressed to justify investing another cent in an organization that conceived such a folly. The company morale could not sustain a failure. Underlying the sales conference was the stark truth that this effort could sink them forever.

  Stax booked all the meeting spaces at the city’s high-end Rivermont Hotel, overlooking the Mississippi River. Guests were greeted by klieg lights outside, and inside by Deanie Parker and her staff, who presented them with weekend schedules that included tours of the Stax studios. The first weekend, May 16–18, 1969, was dedicated to the distributors and sales agents from across the country—those wholesalers who could purchase the records and get them to the public. The following weekend, a one-two punch, was for members of the press and those who could urge the customer to purchase the Stax material, including the all-important “rack jobbers”—the companies that filled the Sears, Woolworth’s, and other non–music store racks with product. The rack jobbers reached the casual shopper who could be converted to an ardent fan. Great numbers of people were flown in at company expense. “We had Billboard and Record World and Cash Box,” says Deanie. “Rolling Stone was there, Playboy, Vanity Fair, Time, Jet, the New York Times. Representatives from BMI, from advertising agencies, publishing companies, and film production companies. Writers came from papers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. We brought in a lot of the ethnic publications. And people came in from England. We did all of the right things right, and it was very, very impressive.” Artists performed their new material, including Booker T. & the MG’s, Carla Thomas, the Staple Singers, William Bell, Albert King, and new rock and roll signees the Knowbody Else (who would later become Black Oak Arkansas).

  The albums that comprised the staggering twenty-eight featured many Stax stalwarts. The MG’s entry, The Booker T. Set, featured them interpreting eleven notable songs from the preceding year, from Sly Stone to the Beatles, the Doors to Herb Alpert. They’d been recently named Instrumental Group of the Year, 1968, by Billboard, and managed to squeeze in their own sessions while producing and backing other artists. “From the company’s perspective, the MG’s were meant to be the support band for Stax Records—always,” Booker explains. “The band would be allowed to make some singles and to have some solo success, but not to the point that we could become separate from the studio. The records weren’t given short shrift but the sessions and the opportunity to make the records were given short shrift. Booker T. & the MG’s, we just scratched the surface of what we could’ve done. The music we were able to do stands on its own and I’m extremely proud of it. I just think we could’ve done a lot more.”

  Steve Cropper, left, speaks with Johnny Baylor at the May 1968 soul explosion sales meeting. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  The Bar-Kays cut their own album for the sales meeting, Gotta Groove. Ambitiously funky, they merged the traditional Stax instrumental with screaming rock and roll guitar, creating in songs like “Street Walker”—its blues harmonica dueling with the guitar’s edginess—a tune that wouldn’t be out of place on a Led Zeppelin album. Huge-sounding fuzz-guitar amps wail atop hard-driving drums. Their interpretation of the B
eatles’ “Yesterday” is cubist and rich, thrilling in its breadth; an embrace of life’s possibilities. Booker says, “I thought the Bar-Kays were fully capable of taking over the Stax tradition.”

  The goal of twenty-eight albums was missed by one: Though there was an album cover for Rufus Thomas’s May I Have Your Ticket, Please? there was no album inside—like getting a graduation envelope filled with a summer-school summons. Rufus was stung. There’d be no shindig were it not for Rufus Thomas and his family, less than a decade back and many a day since. His very spirit was woven into the company’s fabric. Since “Walking the Dog” in 1963, he’d been on and off the lower reaches of the charts (despite great efforts like “Willy Nilly”), and the company couldn’t manage to find time for finishing his record. But Rufus Thomas wore a frog costume on a Beale Street stage when he was five, and he’d been in showbiz long enough to know that if you kept them coming out, one would hit. He was the Clown Prince of Dance and the Funkiest Man Alive, and he remained professional all the way. He performed for the audiences, glad-handed the clients, and smiled his way through both weekends, despite the breach of faith. Instead of giving in to anger and resentment, he kept his eyes on the future. Indeed, he would soon demonstrate how much fun a third comeback could be.

  The highlights of the convocation were the presentations. Each album was introduced with a multiscreen slide show, synchronized music, encouraging words from Jim and Al. With everyone gathered, Stax heralded its new emphasis on distribution, announcing a deal with soul star Jerry Butler and his Chicago-based company, Fountain Records. Interspersed among the business achievements were charitable announcements, including an educational program for the underprivileged called SAFEE—the Stax Association for Everybody’s Education. “The day care centers would be for children whose parents cannot afford to pay to send them to preschools or other centers,” Jim announced. “The trade school would furnish education for students through high school and for those who cannot afford to attend a college or university.”

  The meeting’s keynote speaker was Julian Bond, who was then a state congressman in the Georgia House and a founding member of SNCC, for which he’d been communications director from 1961 to 1966. He hit strong notes of black separatism in his charged address, quoting a speech given 120 years earlier by the first African-American lawyer admitted to practice before the US Supreme Court, Dr. John S. Rock. But by the conclusion, Bond was establishing a broader platform for community activism, unifying the room as young people capable of implementing change. This speech was clearly not your typical music industry rhetoric of sales, markets, and profits. But Julian Bond was there because the Stax that Al Bell envisioned was not your typical music industry company. Stax, a new Stax, was on the rise.

  Isaac Hayes.

  One published estimate calculated Stax’s expenses for the two weekends at a quarter million dollars. “It was awesome,” remembers Al. “And like Atlantic, we had the sales forms there and the purchase orders and our wholesalers left purchasing product”—$2 million worth of product, according to Billboard. “With those twenty-seven albums at one time, folk began to forget that we didn’t have a catalog. Out of that meeting was born Mavis as an individual artist, Isaac Hayes as a giant, and on and on. We came back from the dead not with the vintage Stax sound of Otis Redding and Sam and Dave. We came now as a diversified new company. And that positioned us in the record industry as a viable independent record company. It accelerated from that point forward.”

  20. A Pot of Neckbones

  1969–1970

  Al Bell’s album avalanche would generate dollars, but it would be the singles that would snag the public’s attention and direct them toward Stax’s myriad album possibilities. Thirty singles were chosen from the albums, thirty shots at radio play and chart action. Eddie Floyd won favor with “Don’t Tell Your Mama,” its punctuated beat pushing it to the top twenty of the R&B charts, its string arrangement landing it on the Hot 100 pop charts. Johnnie Taylor continued his drive with “Testify,” landing on both charts, and the MG’s placed in the top forty of each chart with their take on Paul Simon’s recent hit from the soundtrack to The Graduate, “Mrs. Robinson.” Despite the emphasis on pairings—there were singles featuring Mavis with William Bell, and another with her and Eddie Floyd; one with Carla and William, one with Carla and Johnnie Taylor, and a fifth single featuring them all plus others—none of them landed on any charts. In fact, despite all the calculating, the biggest hit from the May ’69 sales meeting wasn’t released as a single until two months later because no real hopes had been pinned on it; it was, to some extent, filler, an easy album that would help boost the numbers, with no single pulled because nothing on Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul was less than five minutes long. The project was decidedly uncommercial: The album cover photo was an unusual angle on Isaac—a frame-filling shot from above of his bald head, the landscape dotted with vacant hair follicles. His face is obscured because he’s looking down, conveying humility, even as the wide gold chain around his neck proclaims a voluptuous arrogance. And there’s skin everywhere: black, beautiful skin.

  Isaac’s breakout record.

  Isaac was unlike anything else in popular music. He wasn’t “the sound of young America,” as Motown had been billing itself since the early 1960s, nor was he treading the soul territory he’d established as a writer and producer at Stax. This was a boudoir record. The pop song opens with a nearly nine-minute tale of lover’s woe—a drumstick tick-tocks the hollow, forlorn sounds of the wood that surrounds the drum while Isaac’s organ moans. The song’s body is relatively brief, Ike and the Bar-Kays breaking into a symphonic, luscious passion so intense that it needs all the five minutes it takes to wind down to the song’s postcoital fade. Immersed in the studio’s possibilities, and his own, with instructions to do as he pleased, he’d opened a door that other singers hadn’t seen, and legions followed him through it, fans and artists alike.

  “I performed at the sales meeting,” remembers Isaac Hayes. “David Porter and I did some Sam and Dave stuff, then I sang ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ and got a standing ovation. That’s when the merchandisers were asking, ‘Did you record that?’ ‘Oh, yes, we have it back there.’ They picked it up and started checking it out. And Hot Buttered Soul took off.” A single was rushed out when the album began garnering sales. DJs absorbed the edited “Phoenix,” then made a hit of the B-side too, an edited “Walk on By.” The album promptly hit four charts—R&B, pop, easy listening, and jazz; on the latter it spent nearly three quarters of a year moving between the top two spots. When The Isaac Hayes Movement was released the following year, Hot Buttered Soul was still in the jazz top ten, and those two albums were there to greet Hayes’s To Be Continued when it came out in December 1970. Making the record to satisfy himself, Isaac reached everyone.

  Besides Isaac, no one could have been more pleased than Al Bell. The soul explosion had been his perilous and expensive experiment. As tall as he stood and strong as he pushed for this massive product creation, Al must have considered the possibility of failure—awake in the middle of the night, alone on the long drives to see his parents in Arkansas. If the soul explosion had been a dud, Stax risked never recovering. But the effort had succeeded grandly, even without Isaac’s ascension; his album was only a part of the convention’s $2 million worth of orders. It was, however, his ongoing, accelerating sales that affirmed the event.

  Into the vacuum created by the death of Otis Redding and the contractual snafu of Sam and Dave stepped Isaac Hayes. Stax no longer was a shadow of its former self, but was becoming a new, revitalized company, with a new star establishing a new look. And as the spotlight shone brighter, Isaac allowed it to illuminate more of him, bringing African-American cultural and social issues to the fore. Isaac established the market that would soon support socially driven concept albums from Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Curtis Mayfield. Isaac gave the old label a new identity.

  Stepping in front of the curtain r
equired adjustment. A few weeks after the sales meeting, Isaac was performing his first concert—August 1969, the Masonic Temple in Detroit, with the Staple Singers as the opening act. Detroit DJ Wash Allen, originally from Memphis, had a midnight to six A.M. show, a time slot that allowed him to stretch out with album cuts instead of short singles. The DJ knew Isaac and liked his groove. He featured the album, and especially “Phoenix,” on his show. “That was basically the way the whole damn thing got started,” says Isaac’s trumpet player and childhood friend Mickey Gregory, who stepped up to handle many of the growing duties that Isaac’s sudden career was demanding. Isaac and Mickey had slept in cars together as children, shared the poverty, and Mickey had Isaac’s back. “The first couple gigs were in Detroit. We flew up with some cats from the studio—Marvell Thomas and Allen Jones [they’d coproduced the record with Al Bell] and Bobby Manuel and Harold Beane.”

  The show sold out more than two weeks in advance, and Isaac, though already a music industry success, was nervous as a high school thespian. “Do you think they’ll like me?” he remembers asking backstage. He eased onto the stage and hit the first song—during which he realized that the microphone needed adjusting. “I started talking to the audience,” he remembers. “I had a terry cloth floppy hat on and I was sweating. I took it off, exposing my head, and women screamed. Ahhh—make a note of that, Ike. The next song, we popped it and we just went on through and did a whole concert. And I got standing ovations. I learned something from that experience. I learned to communicate with the audience.”