Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  The layout of the Stax building, circa 1973, by engineer Dave Purple. Purple won a Grammy, Best Engineered Recording, for his work on “Theme from Shaft.” (The Grammy was shared with Stax engineers Henry Bush and Ron Capone.) (Drawing by David Purple/Courtesy of René Wu)

  Baylor’s ongoing success promoting the label fed Al’s tendency toward expansiveness. If records were such a cinch, how hard could other media be? STAX IN TOTAL EXPANSION PLAN, read a February Billboard headline. Stax announced they were moving “into the Broadway play arena as major backers of ‘The Selling of the President.’” Based on Joe McGinniss’s best-selling book about the marketing of Richard Nixon’s image in 1968, the play would open at Broadway’s Shubert Theatre in late March. Stax put up over a third of the half-million-dollar backing, receiving in return the soundtrack rights, for which they “expect to be as successful . . . as we have with our recent motion picture soundtrack albums such as Shaft.” Broadway, they announced, “is expected to be one of the numerous moves by this Company into the leisure-time areas.”

  The play closed after five performances—but such is the risk of every theatrical venture. Stax was undeterred, announcing it was putting $100,000 into the Melvin Van Peebles Broadway production of Don’t Play Us Cheap; it ran for four and a half months at the Ethel Barrymore Theater and was nominated for two Tony Awards. Stax released the cast recording—as a double album.

  Al Bell, Stax’s chief executive officer by February 1972, quickly realized the inherent problem with a theatrical performance: Each night, there was a maximum number of people it could reach. Seating was limited, and viewers had to make a concerted effort to attend. Al had not forgotten the promise of home video that he’d seen at the Philips International offices, and he understood that the audience for a movie had an exponentially higher possibility for return than a play, especially a movie that could be turned into a home video and also broadcast on TV. “That’s his beauty,” says Wayne Jackson, the Mar-Keys trumpet player who’d cofounded the Memphis Horns. “Making movies appealed to Al Bell because it was bigger than records. When you talk bigger numbers, it’s like fine-tuning his intellect. If you’d have said, ‘Al, a billion dollars,’ he would’ve lit up and shot out the roof like a rocket.”

  The expansion, even when it was successful, did not please everyone. “I was troubled by it, these layers and layers and layers,” says Deanie Parker. “I always wanted to say, ‘Why can’t we be what we are? Why is all this ancillary stuff necessary?’”

  Al Bell wanted an identity on the East and West Coasts as strong as he had across the South. He’d made inroads to the east, but the west . . . so distant, yet to be won. So he established an office there: Stax West, headed by concert promoter Forrest Hamilton, son of drummer Chico Hamilton. “We’re still on this curve of trying to carry forth the resurrection and the ascension,” says Al. “We really hadn’t made our impact into Southern California, Los Angeles, Hollywood.” Stax West suggested the company get more involved in the community, and the idea of helping the Watts Summer Festival caught some traction. This commemoration had begun in the wake of the 1967 Watts riots—also known as the Watts rebellion—which the Stax artists had witnessed when leaving Los Angeles after their “burn, baby, burn” appearance at the 5-4 Ballroom. A program honoring the memory of the thirty-four citizens killed had become an annual event, sometimes flourishing, sometimes not.

  By sending a prominent artist to the festival, Stax would raise both its profile and the event’s. Al began pondering the benefits of sending two artists—more always being better. Look what the Monterey Pop Festival had done for Otis, and for the MG’s. The scope quickly grew large enough to shift locations from the Mafundi Institute in Watts to the much larger Will Rogers Park. In Memphis, meanwhile, the grassroots appeal attracted more artists, and when Isaac Hayes threw his weight behind it, the Watts project assumed magnitude. “Instead of just doing a concert,” says Al, “we began to consider doing the entire Stax roster out there. We’d expose these artists to KGFJ, then the only black radio station in Los Angeles.” The whole roster was tens of people, and would require a yet larger venue. No one’s sure who thought of it, but when the idea was proposed to rent the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the Rams played football in front of a hundred thousand people, Al Bell leapt on it.

  The Coliseum managers had never heard of the client knocking on their door. “We went to rent the stadium,” Al says, “and the management there kind of laughed at us. ‘You’re some little record company from out of Memphis, Tennessee—who do you say these artists are?’ They were laughing.” But a rental is a rental, so the talk continued. “I said, ‘We don’t want LAPD at this concert, we want to be able to bring our own security.’” That task was overseen by Johnny Baylor and Melvin Van Peebles. “So we got the agreement signed and started organizing, started promoting.” The Wattstax concert would be the culmination of the 1972 Watts Summer Festival where, for the price of a single US dollar, nationally lauded soul and gospel acts would perform from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. “The drums started beating louder and louder throughout Los Angeles, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Southern California,” Al says. “We were promoting with door hangers and billboards and planes writing in the sky and planes pulling signs. Print media, television, radio—we were promoting the daylights out of this concert to where it looks like we may pack this stadium. That’s when we got this panicked call—stadium management and law enforcement were concerned. We had to compromise on two points: The LAPD could be outside of the stadium, but not inside. Also, the Los Angeles Rams were going to play the next day and they were concerned about that turf. We had to jump through all kinds of hoops but we got turf insurance from Lloyds of London.”

  The idea of recording the event for an album release—a double album, might as well (and ultimately two double albums)—became obvious. And then the film possibility arose: They’d be in the moviemaking capital, and the Woodstock film and Soul to Soul had proven that concert films were a draw. Tip a domino, create a chain reaction. And like all Stax ideas, this wasn’t all about dollars and sense. “I had preached that our music and our lyrics were a reflection of what goes on in our lives and our lifestyles,” says Al. “And Larry Shaw [in charge of Stax advertising and a producer of the festival and the film] said, ‘Then what we need to do is film this and allow it to become a mirror.’”

  Larry Shaw at Wattstax. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  They brought in producer David Wolper, who’d been doing National Geographic specials since 1966 and had recently made Jacques Cousteau a household name. Wolper also produced Hollywood films, and to direct Wattstax, he brought in Mel Stuart; they’d just made Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory together. “We go and find the finest documentary producers in Hollywood, didn’t care whether they were black or white,” Al says. These two were white. “So once we got Wolper settled, we started seeking all of the black camerapersons through the union and otherwise in Southern California and hired all of them, and had a black camera crew integrated with the white cameramen.” Stax was not missing the opportunity to help individuals who needed work, who needed a résumé booster. (Successful results were evident when, a month after handling the event, the African-American public relations firm the Edward Windsor Wright Corp. was hired by Columbia Records.)

  The event also settled a corporate grievance. Schlitz beer, popular among black drinkers, had been targeted with a boycott by Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH; in time for Wattstax, of which Jackson was one of the MCs, Schlitz signed a corporate covenant with PUSH promising that blacks would become 15 percent of its workforce, and that black businesses would receive 15 percent of the company’s budget for advertising, construction, and insurance. Then Schlitz also agreed to sponsor Wattstax, allowing the revenues to go to the Watts Summer Festival and the other beneficiaries, which included the Martin Luther King Hospital in Watts, the Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation, Operation PUSH, and the Watts Labor C
ommunity and Action Committee. (A percentage of royalties from the film and albums also went to the Watts Summer Festival.) “If only one person steps through those turnstiles,” Stax West’s Hamilton said, “it represents one dollar of profits.”

  On the twentieth of August, 1972, the day dawned clear—which was important because the Coliseum was an open stadium, no roof. That morning, Al Bell saw all those empty seats and wondered how they could possibly fill it up. But promotion was his specialty. The morning kicked off with a parade through Watts, Stax stars riding in open Cadillac convertibles, waving and basking in the California clime, so unlike the swamp back home. Isaac Hayes was the grand marshal (it was his thirtieth birthday). He wore an African striped tunic, riding alongside Johnnie Taylor, Luther Ingram, and David Porter. The quartet was dashing and ebullient. Those citizens too tired to make it outside could tune in to Carla Thomas on Los Angeles radio. “I told them how Booker and all of us had been there right before the 1967 riots,” she says, “and how we were so happy to be back and be a part of the rebuilding, instead of tearing something down.”

  Folks began arriving at the Coliseum, and there was clearly going to be a party. The clothes were radiant—a rainbow that beamed promise, that proclaimed the future, that reclaimed the present. What was bigger—the hats or the bell-bottoms? The Afros or the hoop earrings? Capacity was 92,000, but 112,000 people came through the turnstiles that day, said to be the largest single gathering of African-Americans in one place since the civil rights March on Washington in 1963. “I was thankful we packed the place,” says Al, “because that weighed on my mind.”

  “When we played ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’” Mel Stuart told a reporter, “I was surprised to see a whole audience sitting, talking, eating, or reading newspapers.” Jesse Jackson grabbed their attention, connecting the event to the past and to Stax’s appearance at the time of the riots, declaring, “We’ve gone from ‘burn, baby, burn’ to ‘learn, baby, learn.’” He compelled the audience to join him in his exhortation, “I Am Somebody!” a powerful litany about the beauty and integrity of each single person (and also the title track from his debut album on the Stax subsidiary Respect Records). Stax artist Kim Weston began the gospel classic “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” popularly known as the Black National Anthem. By then, Stuart observed, the crowd’s attention was fixed on the stage, and nearly en masse they all rose, joining in the words. Front and center, Al Bell in a white suit and orange shirt, and Rev. Jackson in a flowing African shirt, lifted their right fists into the air, holding them there, clenched: the Black Power salute. Tens of thousands of fists joined. The crowd was paying attention now.

  “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at Wattstax. Jesse Jackson, left, and Al Bell. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

  At that early moment in the show, it could already be declared a success. “Then, as now, if you were young and black (forget gifted) in this country, you were always looking for honorable terms to define yourself and your relationship to the society,” Stokely Carmichael said of the times. “What in this ‘white republic’ truly represented you? With what or whom could you identify? And where did one look to find them? If one did not find these figures and values within one’s immediate circles—family, friends, school, or church—you were not going to find them anywhere else, certainly not in the public media. Until the movement came along, we Africans—unless athletes or musicians—were rarely to be seen, except on the local news being accused of crimes.” On that stage on that day, African-American leaders stood before their people, presenting a cornucopia of culture by, about, for, and policed by blacks (though little policing was needed).

  “When Al and I had our fists extended,” says Rev. Jesse Jackson, “we were proving that you could have this mass gathering of mostly blacks in Watts and it would be nonviolent. It was a resurrection, a kind of revival of hope and possibility and mass strength.”

  The convocation-cum-party began with the first thirteen acts performing only a single song each—the stage change sometimes taking longer than the musical performance. “It was almost like a doctor’s surgery queue with the nurse yelling out ‘next please’ all the time,” wrote one reviewer. “Thus, William Bell, Eddie Floyd, Ernie Hines, Jimmy Jones, Frederick Knight, Little Sonny, Debra Manning, Eric Mercury, Freddy Robinson, Lee Sain, Freddie Williamson, the Sons of Slum and the Newcomers simply didn’t stand a chance.” Maybe not a chance of winning over the crowd, but a great chance to appear in the movie, to introduce themselves to a potential fan base that was unfamiliar with them. “Frederick Knight looks good and I will look forward to witnessing his show,” the same reviewer wrote, indicating a successfully whetted appetite.

  Most of the more established stars performed for about twenty minutes. The Temprees won screams for their choreography, and the Soul Children livened up the place with “Hearsay,” their strongest single (number-five R&B, pop top fifty) since signing with Stax four years earlier; Albert King doused the crowd in fiery blues. The Staple Singers made a surprise appearance, thanks indirectly to Richard Nixon. They’d been performing in Las Vegas as the opening act for Sammy Davis Jr. two shows a day. However, the day before Wattstax, Davis told the Staples that he’d be canceling his early show to make a campaign appearance for Richard Nixon; it became the day of his notorious presidential hug. The Staples made haste. “Pops called Al Bell,” says Mavis, “said, ‘Listen, man, we can make it to Wattstax.’ And they got us there. We flew in, did our songs, stayed a while, and flew back to Las Vegas. That was the largest crowd any of us had ever seen.” The Bar-Kays are captured in the film’s full-color glory, giving a career-making performance of “Son of Shaft/Feel It.” The original surviving members, James Alexander and Ben Cauley, had fully succeeded in their quest of being bigger, grander, funkier, more ostentatious, and musical—deeply, rhythmically, musical. Their outfits that day, all high-seventies outrageousness, included a white Afro wig the size of the Goodyear blimp. They move onstage like a rollercoaster thrill—unforgettable. The same way Elvis believed he had the extra energy of his dead twin, the Bar-Kays were given not only their own power, energy, and souls, but also all that of their brethren who had died so tragically. Their latest album, Do You See What I See, was influenced by their work on Shaft but was decidedly its own. Fearless, each Bar-Kays album took them in a new direction, rooted in soul but pushing the boundaries, open-minded and thrilling.

  For her set, Carla Thomas mixed past and present, reaching all the way back to “Gee Whiz,” and also composing a new song “about myself and my God,” she explained in her introduction to “I Have a God Who Loves.” Standing tall in a maxi-dress of many colors and an outsize Afro, she sang in a voice so strong that the heavens would have no trouble tuning in. David Porter proved himself a performer of the first degree, not that it was in doubt; he’d mastered the stage long before he entered a recording studio. “His intro is superbly conceived,” a concert reviewer wrote. “The band comes through with a dramatic and melodical opener, then two lithe young ladies come on stage and dance their way provocatively through a couple of minutes, all the time building up the climax before the man comes on.” David arrived—his hip suit suave with a Latin tinge—and delivered a set both intimate and grand.

  The day had drawn well into the night before the show’s finale. There was disappointment backstage as the set changes and other delays inherent in such a massive event caused the cancellation of several key acts. Luther Ingram, Johnnie Taylor, the Emotions, Mel & Tim, and Little Milton all were ready, willing, and present, but there were not enough minutes in the day. Filming of some was rescheduled. Anticipation was high as MC Rev. Jesse Jackson revved up the crowd for the climax. While he spoke, a station wagon drove onto the field. Isaac Hayes had come from among the people, and he was still of the people; no limousine for him. He mounted the stage wearing his terry cloth hat, which Rev. Jackson made much ado about removing. When his shining pate was revealed, the crowd went wild, a cranial striptease. His set opened wit
h two tracks from the Shaft soundtrack, the opening title and then “Soulsville,” the latter introduced with, “You can say it’s a mild form of protest. You can also say it’s an informative tune because it tells about the situation in the ghetto. Now we know about it, but we’re going to let the outside world know what’s happening.” He really hit his stride covering Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” the formula of spoken intro and extended jams hitting all the right grooves. Pianist Sidney Kirk plays a solo that captures Memphis’s blues roots at its most polysyllabic and funky; Skip Pitts’s guitar goes crazy, somewhere in the ether where the Bar-Kays meet heavy metal.

  The day was notable for its lack of problems. Really, there was only one, and it was potentially riotous. Rufus Thomas took the stage at dusk in a pink outfit: cape, hot pants, shirt, and white knee-high go-go boots. He looked the hundred thousand people in the eye and asked them, with a model’s reveal of his fashionable garb, “Ain’t I’m clean?” The place exploded. His set included “The Funky Chicken,” still hot from a year earlier, and as he exhorted the crowd to “get on up,” they got on over, climbing the fence and turning the Rams’ football field into a raucous dance party. Everyone was highstepping—except Al Bell, who immediately thought of the insurance policy. Randy Stewart and Larry Shaw got Rufus’s ear, and at the song’s end, the Funkiest Man Alive coaxed and cajoled the partiers back to their seats. “Don’t jump the fence, it don’t make no sense,” Rufus chanted. “All power to folks that go to the stand,” he incanted. It was crowd control at its finest, down to the very last straggler. The entire film sequence of Rufus sweet-talking the fans back to their seats is a lesson for police tactical units around the world.