Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Steve had a harder time leaving Stax, perhaps because his business ties were more entwined. To get out of his existing agreement, Cropper had to give up his stake in Stax’s publishing (worth about $100,000); he had to commit to a two-year exclusive writing contract with Stax’s publishing company; he had to produce several recordings for Stax at his new studio; and, instead of announcing his departure from Stax, he had to agree that Stax could announce he’d been promoted to a new vice president’s position. On September 20, 1970, Steve signed on the dotted line, established Trans Maximus Inc. a few miles from College and McLemore, produced records by Eddie Floyd and Eric Mercury for Stax, and was hired independently to make records for Jeff Beck, Poco, and Tower of Power. Not that leaving the company made him—or them—happy. “We were all family and it’s tough to break up a family. I just felt like if they were gonna continue business the way they were, that it was gonna head for disaster at some point.”

  In the wake of Isaac’s hit, more R&B hits kept coming: the Soul Children hit the top ten with “The Sweeter He Is”; Eddie Floyd went top forty with “Why Is the Wine Sweeter”; Johnnie Taylor hit number four with “Love Bones”; the Emotions hit the top forty with “Stealing Love”—all of these also hit the pop charts, and this list is just for latter 1969. Rufus Thomas also made his comeback then, releasing “Do the Funky Chicken,” which went to number-five R&B and number-twenty-eight pop.

  Another Stax-associated artist established himself in early 1970—Luther Ingram. Luther was Johnny Baylor’s artist, signed to Baylor’s Koko label that Stax distributed. Baylor, well before coming to Memphis, had hired Luther in New York as a songwriter, and soon made him an artist. They tried a variety of styles before falling into the soul ballad groove with a version of the Allen Jones and Homer Banks song that had been a hit for Johnnie Taylor, “Ain’t That Lovin’ You (for More Reasons Than One).” Luther took it to the top-ten R&B and close to pop’s top forty. “Johnny was a hell of a record producer,” says Isaac’s friend and trumpet player Mickey Gregory. “If he had spent as much time producing as he did trying to be a badass, he would have been recognized as a great producer.” With this record, Baylor knew he’d found something: Luther’s was a bedroom voice, a between-the-sheets crooner. In that style, Baylor would soon coax from Luther one of the decade’s biggest hits.

  The hits came from good airplay, and the good response from radio still grew from Al’s connections. “Al Bell was the one who was making it happen,” reports Johnny Keyes, who did not return to Isaac’s entourage and instead traveled as a promotions man for Stax. “His was the name that you heard. You didn’t really think of Jim Stewart as much. So the face changed.” In late 1969, Al was named Record Executive of the Year by the Radio Program Conference; the following year, NATRA named him Man of the Year, and he was on Ebony magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential Blacks in the United States.

  Jim had grown his hair long and taken to the loud fashion of the day. He’d thrown big parties and tasted the high life. The clothes he could do, but the spotlight didn’t suit him. “I didn’t like the hoopla, the glitter, the limousines and the jets, the parties,” Jim says. “That was Bell’s forte.”

  National Association of Television and Radio Announcers, 1970. L–R: Dino Woodard, Jack “the Rapper” Gibson, Harold Burnside, Al Bell, John Smith (rear), Mack Guy, and JoJo Samuels. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  Despite Stax’s phenomenal comeback and its ongoing show of strength, Gulf & Western continued to insert itself into the business. “They wanted to gain some kind of creative control,” says Jim. “More and more they wanted to become involved in the day-to-day operations and at one point wanted to move the company to the West Coast. We said no.”

  Soon after, Gulf & Western announced its intention to consolidate its record label holdings and distribution under the Dot Records imprint; that is, they wanted to fold Stax and merge it with Dot, which was pushing easy listening artists like Billy Vaughn and Anita Kerr. “We saw that as a death knell,” says Jim. During his travels, Al Bell had seen warehouses full of Dot releases, and retail shelves lacking them, so he had no interest in being caught up in a system that couldn’t get records to the stores. “I fought the consolidation,” Al says. “I was called in and questioned about not being cooperative, and they had been told that I had spent this inordinate amount of money producing Hot Buttered Soul with these four tracks on it and that that wasn’t industry standard. And they said I had given monies to Isaac Hayes, and that I should not have been doing that. Finally I said, ‘Jim, let’s see if we can’t buy this company back and get out of Gulf & Western because this isn’t gonna work.’ And Jim was supportive. By that time, that stock they’d paid us with was toilet paper.” Indeed, after a period of sustained growth since 1961, the US gross domestic product dropped, and for about a year from December 1969 unemployment grew and inflation rose. As an economic recession spread across the nation, the value of the stock payments diminished.

  At a Billboard industry conference in Majorca, Spain, Al learned that the Deutsche Grammophon company, the industry leader in classical music, had an interest in exploring popular music. “Our sales numbers were very impressive,” Al explains, “and Deutsche Grammophon made available to us a loan that was almost enough for us to acquire Stax back from Gulf & Western. For doing that, we would give them exclusive rights to international representation of Stax, and a minority interest in the company. The other dollars, which was about a million dollars, we were able to secure through Union Planters National Bank. We’d been banking all of this time with them and they were enjoying our successes.”

  The buyback was not consummated until July 24, 1970, terminating the two-year relationship. “I went to Charlie Bluhdorn at Gulf & Western and told him we wanted to buy the company back,” says Al. “He said, ‘Buy the company back? Public companies don’t do that.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but we want to buy the company back.’ And we finally persuaded him to do it—I think it was $4.5 million that he wanted.”

  “It cost us a million dollars over and above what they’d put in,” says Jim, “plus the product they made money off of while they were in. They’d paid us in stock, and some cash. We paid them cash. Stax was prospering.” The deal returned to them not only the Stax company but also the publishing companies, including East/Memphis and Birdees Music—the latter acquisitions meaning a sudden avalanche of work for Tim Whitsett, the publishing administrator. “Boxes started arriving of all of our copyrights, which Famous Music, a part of Paramount and Gulf & Western, had been looking after,” says Tim. “I was appalled at how many songs hadn’t been copyrighted, how many songs didn’t have contracts, how many songs weren’t registered with performing-rights societies. So we had to hire some staff and we poured ourselves into trying to get all the files straightened out.”

  The two deals—Deutsche Grammophon and Union Planters Bank—both had important ramifications. During Bell’s visit to Germany, he saw that Philips, Deutsche Grammophon’s parent company, was developing videocassettes, an innovation that would change not only home movies but, more important, how films were distributed. “I saw an opportunity to get involved in motion picture production,” says Al, “because I had motion pictures on my mind. With them as a minority stockholder, it would be easier to talk about other ventures that would allow us to expand even further into the marketplace.” In this world before home video, when movies had little life after their theatrical run, Al had glimpsed the future: People would collect movies like they collected records, and Stax could produce these movies and reach a ready audience through their established distribution system. With solid money and solid manufacturing innovations, Deutsche Grammophon was an attractive partner indeed.

  The bank loan, larger than any of Stax’s previous single-deal loans, had been amortized over a couple years, but due to Isaac Hayes’s runaway success and the steady flow of hits from others, Stax paid it off in five months. “It freaked them out,” says Al, “I mean it frea
ked them out. We were growing so rapidly.”

  “The bank,” says Joe Harwell, Stax’s representative at Union Planters, “had previously considered the music business a bunch of long-haired hippies who shot up dope all the time. But after that, they saw it as a source of great potential profit.”

  “From that point forward,” Al continues, “every time we’d turn around, we were getting calls from Union Planters National Bank, wanting to know if we needed any money. I was getting many invitations to eat in the executive dining room with the president of the bank.

  “We bought the company back from Gulf & Western, and continued to operate it as an independent, freestanding record company, and the curve kept on going up. We kept generating more and more revenue, kept daring to be different and kept defying what they said couldn’t be done.”

  21. Shaft

  1971–1972

  Isaac Hayes shot to fame like an express elevator to the penthouse floor. He released two albums in 1970, The Isaac Hayes Movement and To Be Continued, each built like Hot Buttered Soul—two songs on each side, with Ike’s extended, intimate raps gliding listeners into his velvety world. Both raced up the charts.

  The Isaac Hayes Movement came out in March and spent six weeks at the number-one spot on the soul chart; it stayed on the chart nearly the whole rest of the year, falling off just in time for the December release of To Be Continued, which ran to the top. Movement spent a year and a half on the Billboard 200 album chart and featured a version of the Jerry Butler song “I Stand Accused” as its single, which proved popular among both soul and pop audiences. The album art finds Isaac relishing his newfound star status. The cover opens to reveal a vertical centerfold of Isaac, shirtless, wearing thick gold chains around his neck and waist. His arms are forward and down, as if he’s lifting something, or someone. The lighting is dramatic, he’s wearing dark shades, and it’s all so supercool that it trumps the back cover shot of him seated, draped in a matching multilayered zebra-striped outfit with a high collar and zebra cap. Isaac Hayes, song interpreter. Mellow and mature, intimate and warm. Dance? The horizontal dance, ma cherie. The next album, To Be Continued, hit the top of the soul and jazz album charts, and fell just shy of the pop top ten. “Isaac became a major artist, selling gold, then platinum, and double platinum,” says his drummer Willie Hall. “Everywhere you went, you’d read about Isaac. You turn the radio on, every station, you’d hear his material. It was wonderful. Everybody had money to spend. I managed to take my family out of the ghetto and buy our first home. Things were really good.”

  Though Isaac had established himself first as a songwriter, none of these three albums featured any of his own songs. (He’d cowritten “Hyperbolic . . . ” and by To Be Continued, he’d begun naming his long introductions, which allowed him to collect a publishing royalty on them.) The lack of original material followed the termination of his songwriting partnership—Isaac had always taken care of the music, David handled the lyrics. Without David, Isaac could maneuver other people’s words, he could rearrange established hits—but he wasn’t writing new songs. “I try to express myself in music,” he told a journalist in 1970, putting a positive spin on it. “I generally prefer to do covers of other songs. I like to change the arrangement and do big productions, taking the songs into a completely different world.”

  Another world was, in fact, opening up for Isaac. The MGM movie studio was facing a slump at the box office, and before bellying up, they were willing to take inexpensive gambles, such as throwing half a million dollars at a movie that could wring a few bucks from the neglected African-American audience. The recent release of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, saturated in black pride, had summoned an untapped market demographic. It opened with text on screen: “This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man.” Filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles had funded and made the show himself, producing, directing, editing, and starring—among other roles. When the Chicago band Earth, Wind & Fire recorded the soundtrack, they had yet to release their first album and were totally unknown. With no promotion budget, Van Peebles approached Stax about pre-releasing the soundtrack; their promotional prowess in the black community was established, and he knew that a soundtrack would readily appeal to the company’s expansive nature. (Additionally, vocalist Maurice White was from the same Memphis housing project where David Porter had grown up, so he had an in.) Three months after Stax’s album release, the movie premiered. In addition to its sex scenes, part of the movie’s appeal is that Sweetback survives the Man’s manhunt—he outsmarts Whitey and escapes. As word spread, big crowds came to the theaters. Stax was ahead of that game; Al Bell arranged with the Detroit theater owner where it first screened to sell the soundtrack in the lobby, and he shipped three hundred albums. More were ordered the next day. “Many theater owners were hesitant about our suggestions to make albums available in the lobbies,” says Al, “until they discovered how profitable it could be.”

  When MGM was designing its African-American pitch for Shaft, it too reached out to Stax. Isaac recalls MGM’s concept: “A movie targeted at the black consumer market to have a black director, black leading actor, black editor, black composer. And I was asked to do the music.” He’d always wanted to be on the screen, and this role seemed right for him: “A private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks,” as Isaac would soon write in the theme song. He said he’d commit to the music if he were allowed a screen audition. Isaac soon learned that the lead had gone to Richard Roundtree, a model who’d become prominent touring with the Fashion Fair promoted by Ebony magazine. The twenty-eight-year-old Hayes expressed his disappointment—but agreed to honor his musical commitment.

  Some weeks later, the director Gordon Parks called. Parks was a revered fashion photographer, known also for turning his camera—still pictures and film—on African-American life. Shaft was his foray into bigger movies. He told Isaac he was sending him a few scenes to score. No one called them a test, but Isaac knew that if he didn’t get it right, the job would vanish. “Gordon Parks knew I’d never done a soundtrack so they handled me with kid gloves,” he says. “And I appreciated that. Gordon said to me, ‘Shaft is always roving, always moving. Your music should depict that—something to capture his personality. His being. He’s a cool dude too. But he’s tough. You got to put all that in your music.’”

  Willie Hall recalls being introduced to the project. “We’re in the studio recording with Isaac,” Willie says of the Bar-Kays. “We’d work through the night, and Isaac’s in and out of the studio constantly—taking phone calls, doing business. Isaac even had a phone in his car—back when that took up nearly all of his trunk. He comes back from a break, and he and Al Bell wheeled this machine in. They didn’t have the big video screen back then, so we all were squeezed in, trying to look in this little machine that you could see the footage through [a Moviola]. Everything was hush-hush and we see Richard Roundtree coming up out of the subway, walking down Broadway. Isaac said, ‘I got a surprise for you all. We’re gonna do a soundtrack to this movie.’ Everybody went, ‘Wow’—but we have no clue of what the procedure is gonna be.” Lester Snell, keyboardist, remembers that the next question by all was, “How much will we get paid?”

  Hayes was ready for the challenge. Soundtracks worked toward his strength—music and drama; he’d not need a lyricist. He told Willie to note the tempo of the characters walking. “He said, ‘I want you to play sixteenths on the high hat to that tempo,’” Willie continues. “So they rolled the machine over to me, and I play the high hat. The tempo of his steps is where we got the tempo of the song from.” Hall begins making the cymbal sounds, the classic cymbal sounds, that open the Shaft theme song.

  They set to work. The title theme’s trademark wah-wah guitar sound was accidental. “When I play rhythm, I will put a lot of drum beats with it,” says guitarist Charles “Skip” Pitts. For Shaft, “I was checking my pedals. I tested my overdrive, my reverb, the Maestro box, and then I started in
with the wah-wah. Isaac stopped everything and said, ‘Skip, what is that you’re playing?’ I said, ‘I’m just tuning up.’ He said, ‘Keep playing that G octave.’” Set to Willie’s sixteenth notes, they had the makings of something good.

  “Within two hours we had the arrangement for the main title,” says Isaac. “The next piece of footage was the montage through Harlem. Did the music to that in about an hour and a half. It would become ‘Soulsville.’ The third piece was the love scene. I wrote that in about an hour, which later became ‘Ellie’s Love Theme.’” Isaac flew to New York, to Gordon Parks’s East Side apartment overlooking the UN headquarters. “I had the tapes under my arm. Gordon was cooking some lamb chops, man it smelled so good in there. And he teased me because I liked apple butter instead of mint jelly with lamb chops. I’m a country boy, what do you want?” After dining, they put the footage on the Moviola and the tapes on the deck. Gordon watched. “He said, ‘Okay, you can go to Hollywood now and start on the film.’ Just like that.”

  It was a learning experience for everybody. Excited, their lack of experience fed their innovation.

  “We were gigging every weekend on the East Coast,” says Lester Snell. “We’d fly east and gig Friday, Saturday, Sunday, fly back Sunday night to be on set Monday morning. MGM put us on a schedule: Be on set at nine and work till five every afternoon. Just like a job. We had six weeks to do the movie—compose fifteen songs, rehearse them, lay out according to soundtrack, and then record. And still gig on weekends. It was a killer.”

  “That whole adventure was exciting,” says Willie. “Skip and Michael and myself, we used to get in trouble on the studio lot because they had these bicycles you use to get from one area to the other. We’d be turning the corner, we’re running over folks, man, people in costumes would be falling, they’d call and report us. ‘Hey, man, you got to keep those niggers out of the way, they’re running over everybody.’ But we had a lot of fun and they loved us.”