Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Clive Davis sought Al Bell. “I talked to Clive about what I was trying to achieve with Stax,” says Al, “and why, even though we had sold a tremendous amount of records, we were still having difficulty penetrating the white market. Clive wanted to penetrate deeper into the black market and the black community. CBS had the massive mass-merchandising machine, and we had the diverse black product.”

  “Bell and the attorneys did the negotiation,” says Jim. “I didn’t get involved. He became chairman of Stax and the only director. He had all the power—which is the way I wanted it. All I wanted was my money. I never even read the agreement.”

  This contract that Jim didn’t read was more beneficial to him than the one he’d not read with Atlantic. Columbia was loaning Stax $6 million for distribution rights; with that, Al would buy out Jim’s ownership for $2.5 million up front and use the rest for operating capital. Jim would also be paid $62,500 per month from Stax for the next five years, and a final payment of $1.5 million on January 3, 1978. All told, he would receive more than $7.5 million for his stake. Union Planters, knowing what was good for Stax was good for them, agreed to subordinate its $1.7 million in loans to Stax so the CBS deal could go through. That was no issue; Stax had recently paid off its $2.5 million loan from the Deutsche Grammophon buyback and was among the bank’s favored customers. To assure continuity, Jim’s sale to Al was kept from the public. Jim agreed to keep his title, president, for five more years. No need to disturb distributors and other associates; their experience would be the same. No need to alarm Memphis’s white business circles with news that one of the city’s largest corporations was now black-owned. A change within, but from the outside, status quo.

  The meeting of the minds, held at the Park Lane Hotel in Manhattan, went further than sharing expertise. Al requested, and Clive conceded, that their new deal be unique in this way: It would only cover distribution. It would not be a production deal like Stax had with Atlantic (or Philadelphia International had with Columbia), where Stax made the recordings, sent in the finished tape, and Atlantic did everything else. This deal would preserve all of the independence that Stax had established—its art department would make the covers, its pressing plant deals would remain in effect, its marketing and promotion men would still beat the pavement to drum up radio interest and to prepare shelf space. The difference would be how the records got to the stores: Stax would deliver all of its Stax, Volt, and Enterprise product to Columbia distribution centers instead of to their collage of indie distributors. The CBS branch distribution system was known for its effectiveness, able to respond to market demand, able to move tens of thousands of records into a region as soon as demand was felt. It was agile enough for Al to feel comfortable relinquishing the control he had over his present system. Through Columbia, Al would get records where he’d been trying for years to get them; in return, the demand for Stax product would lead Columbia to new accounts at the indie mom-and-pop outlets, giving Columbia an express-way to the heart of the African-American community.

  Davis knew that access to Stax’s small African-American retailers would be worth considerable money in the long term, and he was willing to pay for that by making considerably less money on this deal. Albums then retailed for $5.98; for this deal, Stax was paid $2.26 per sale by Columbia, while Columbia, as distributor, received around fifty cents. “We were responsible for manufacturing, financing all of the marketing of the product, and doing everything,” says Al. “All they did was sell, ship, bill, and collect.”

  For Jim, the money and the relief from responsibilities were exactly what he wanted. “I wanted to be away from the promotion and the business aspect of the record business,” says Jim, “to work in the studio on my own time whenever I felt like it.” But Jim had become an outsider in his own studio. In early 1972, he’d had had a tiff with the engineers; he wanted to improve a Soul Children song by deleting a section, and the engineers thought what he was removing was exactly what would appeal to the coveted “white market.” Levelheaded Jim lost his cool, reportedly stating, “I don’t give a good God damn if we never sell another record to a white person.” The bit stayed, but Jim didn’t; it would be more than two years before he returned to the studio. Jim got his money, and Jim got out. He bought a vacation home in Miami on the intercontinental waterway; out back he kept the Dream Boat, a fifty-two-foot vessel with two bedrooms, and a young couple who maintained it. “When I get away from the studio, I want to be totally away from it,” he says. “I prefer to get on my boat and head to the Florida Keys. No phones ringing, nobody to bother me.” He liked getting way out in the water, where he couldn’t see land, where telephones, aggressions, and problems couldn’t reach. He kept his company title, but he stayed away from the McLemore studio and rarely showed up at the administrative offices. He was out.

  Reaction to the deal at Columbia was less than warm. Bruce Lundvall, Columbia vice president of marketing, remembers Clive’s early interest in Stax at a National Association of Recording Merchandisers convention. “I said we’d heard some things that weren’t so savory,” Lundvall explains. “I’d had a call from a rack jobber [a local distributor] in Washington, DC. He apparently had several very uncomfortable visits from Baylor and company. He said, ‘They’re criminals. If I was late with my payments, they’d send someone in with a gun and put it on the table.’ We were being advised by a very loyal customer that these were not savory people, these enforcers. One would bring a record to a radio station. If the DJ didn’t play it, the next guy would come in and he might give you a handshake more hearty than you would like. Breaking a hand, or threatening to kill somebody, is more persuasive than a hundred-dollar bill.”

  Lundvall and Logan Westbrooks, director of special markets, each remember a quickly assembled morning meeting at Columbia. “Johnny Baylor and his crew were there,” Lundvall remembers. “I’d never met them. They were rough-and-tumble characters. We heard loud and clearly that we weren’t any good at breaking records in the black marketplace. They said, ‘Get the first single out, we’ll get it on the radio immediately.’ I was curious as to how they would do that. Dino hit the conference room table with his fist, said, ‘Get it out now, smack, we’ll get it on the air.’”

  “There was resentment from the very beginning,” says Westbrooks. “Every entity that came into CBS, the deal was the marketing and promotion as well as manufacturing and distribution. Here is a deal dumped on your lap that’s for distribution only and you’re told, ‘Make it work.’”

  On October 24, 1972, Stax got its $6 million. The proud indie label was in a distribution partnership with the world’s largest record company. The coffers were full, ideas myriad. “So,” says Al, “we were off to the races.”

  November 1972, the next month. Airline hijacking incidents had been on the rise for four years, and after domestic incidents early in 1972, the Nixon administration instituted airport security regulations. No longer would you be able to arrive late at the airport, kiss the wife good-bye, and dash madly to your gate. Cubans, Palestinians, bank robbers—those with an axe to grid or a gun to shoot were commandeering flights. The new regulations, set for early 1973, stipulated the x-raying of all carry-on baggage and the screening of all passengers. Then, on November 10, a Southern Airways flight originating in Memphis was hijacked out of Birmingham, Alabama, by three men who threatened to fly it into the nuclear reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was the lead story in the Memphis morning paper on November 11, and a prominent headline the following day: HIJACKING INCREASES AIRPORT SECURITY. It was the nation’s second hijacking within two weeks. An official was quoted as saying, “Now that [hijackers] have been run out of the larger terminals . . . they’re going to seek out the smaller ones where there’s less protection.” A follow-up article was devoted specifically to the increased security of that particular flight: Memphis to Birmingham to Montgomery. Feature articles continued through the month.

  On the morning of November 30, the Nixon administration issued an
emergency measure requiring all of the nation’s airports to provide policemen or armed guards to help intercept potential hijackers. That same morning, Johnny Baylor, apparently not a subscriber to the newspaper, entered the Memphis International Airport. As always, he was dressed impeccably in a suit, every hair in place. Destination: Birmingham. Airline: Southern Airways. He stood in the security line and, as his traveling companion Daryl Williams remembers, when asked to open the briefcase, Baylor obliged, but asked first to be taken aside. He lifted the hinged lid and revealed within neat stacks of green American bills totaling, it was later determined, more than $129,000. “When they saw that amount of money,” says Daryl, “they checked the crime report to see if anything had been robbed or stolen. Nothing turned up.” A search of Baylor’s person revealed a check with his name on it. For half a million dollars. From the Stax Organization.

  Johnny Baylor was interrogated by white men with close-cropped hair, skinny black ties, and plaid Bear Bryant Alabama Crimson Tide hats. He was carrying the money, Baylor explained, because the money was his. In Birmingham, he intended to deposit it with his mother. Banks? He didn’t believe in them, thank you. “They allowed us to board the plane,” Daryl says, “but they also contacted the Feds. Five agents boarded. Johnny spotted the guys, I wasn’t aware of it.” Johnny sent Daryl off the plane. “He told me to go home, he’d call me. Two got off with me and they tailed me home to see where I lived.” The flight departed, Johnny Baylor and his money on board.

  The Birmingham arrival, however, did not go smoothly. Like the ship carrying Jonah, the plane was stopped before reaching the gate. Men who shopped at the same haberdashery as the Memphis interrogators crossed the tarmac, intent on retrieving one man. Earlie Biles remembers getting a call from Baylor. “He just said he needed Al,” she says, “and the way he told me he needed him, I found Al for him.”

  Al Bell dismisses the incident, explaining the monies as legitimate industry expenses, an acknowledgment of the always-and-still-shadowy world of industry promotions. (Stax’s 1972 tax return would include a $111,000 line item for “miscellaneous,” which the company comptroller later termed “cash transactions.”) Before that flight, Al explains, “I called Johnny, and said, ‘Johnny, I owe you some money.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you do, because I see this Luther [‘If Loving You Is Wrong’] is selling out here. How much money you owe me?’ I said, ‘Johnny, right at a million dollars.’ He said, ‘Well, Dick, I better come in there and get my money.’” Baylor had asked for, and received, a royalty rate nearly triple the industry standard. “This was coming into the Christmas season, and he’d kept us alive while we negotiated with Columbia. It’s time now for us to announce this Columbia deal, which I knew was gonna be a rough sell, based on how Columbia was perceived at black radio at that time. So I got Ed Pollack, who was the head of Stax’s finance, to get fifty thousand dollars cash so we could get gifts for these disk jockeys, so when we announced that we got this deal with Columbia, these disc jockeys aren’t pissed off at us. So Johnny had this check that I’d given him, and he had the cash to take on the trip and buy these gifts. In Birmingham, the FBI questioned him, found nothing wrong—’cause there was nothing wrong. They call the IRS, so the IRS came, took the money.” The IRS then filed a federal tax lien with the local registrar against Baylor for nearly $2 million. The attorney Baylor hired—Richard Z. Steinhaus—counted among his clients Kraft Foods and the Motion Picture Association of America. Soon after, Stax altered its books, changing the reason for the half-million-dollar check to Baylor from its original entry, “loan,” to “royalty payment.” Later it was changed again, to “promotional fee.” These changes could be interpreted as Stax searching for a justification for the payments.

  “It was his money,” says Jim about Baylor, “what the hell is wrong with that? They blow up, assume it’s drug money. That’s bullshit. I happen to know it was his money.”

  Everything still sounded like hits, but the rhythm was amiss.

  As 1973 dawned, despite this recent crisis, the Stax Organization had a sunny outlook. A headline in Billboard announced, STAX CLOSES RECORD YEAR. They were sitting atop annual revenue in excess of $11 million (and efforts were under way by Baylor to reclaim his fees from the IRS). The year’s end had showered them with an array of national awards, including the naming of Dino Woodard as Promotion Man of the Year and Luther Ingram as Most Promising Male Vocalist by the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers; Al Bell was given the National Pacesetter Award by the US Department of Commerce. In the immediate future, ready to ride wide on the Columbia distribution, were releases by the Staple Singers, Johnnie Taylor, Isaac Hayes, the Dramatics, and other hitmakers, as well as the national rollout of the Wattstax film and its double LP soundtrack.

  “Wattstax is the company’s spearhead for the young white market of middle America,” Larry Shaw told Billboard. “Our radio spots and print ads for the album will refer to the movie, and then all the movie advertising will refer back to the music.” Stax dedicated a quarter-million-dollar promotional budget to the project. Two hundred disc jockeys and radio programmers were flown to Wattstax film previews in four cities. There were posters and billboards. In February 1973, there were star-studded premieres in both Hollywood and New York. College students in Los Angeles entered an essay contest, competing for a $1,000 prize, writing on “The Black Experience in America.” Media mogul Merv Griffin, with whom Stax had partnered on a TV taping at Caesar’s Palace the previous December, devoted a whole episode of his TV show to Stax artists and Wattstax. “We did a promotional tour with that film,” says Carla Thomas. “We went to different cities all over the country and up in Canada.” Trailers hailed it as “A Soulful Expression of the Black Experience.” The film’s R rating for its language was utilized for promotion by Stax: “Rated R for ‘Real.’”

  The documentary had been a bold gamble, and it became a genius move. It promoted Stax generally, and branded it with community involvement particularly; it was good entertainment and good business. Coincident with the film’s release, fifty stations broadcast a four-hour edited version of the concert. (In March, more being better, a six-hour version of the concert was made available.) Each major city’s premiere benefited a local African-American charity, and Stax stars were present at most. “Black-oriented films have never had the lavish, old-Hollywood premiere before,” Larry Shaw said. “And we feel it’s important that Wattstax be presented with that kind of fanfare.”

  The film had a European premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, May 10, 1973, and earned rave reviews. European bookings commenced, helping the movie quickly earn nearly a million and a half dollars—a tidy profit in that. Larry Nix recounts a celebratory company picnic on rural land that Al owned: “They flew in Maine lobster for everybody.”

  (Earlie Biles Collection)

  Their community efforts continued unbounded. Isaac and the other artists performed numerous benefits on local, regional, and national levels. The infusion of young employees bursting with strident enthusiasm deepened the feeling of black pride that pulsed through the environment. “Whenever there was a black cause, Stax rose to the occasion,” says Bar-Kays drummer Willie Hall. “Al Bell, Isaac Hayes—they made sure of that. Stax wasn’t militant, but it was all black. Even though there was fortune being made at Stax, we were still having problems as a people. Whether it was homeless children, or something wrong happened to one black child across town, Stax always rose to the occasion.”

  “People read about what Al was doing at Stax and started coming in asking for support,” says Earlie, Al’s gatekeeper. “You name it, they came to Stax and they got monetary support.” Roving solicitors left with checks for the Angela Davis Defense Fund, for local churches, for national political efforts.

  As the community effort grew, Jim Stewart (from the sidelines) saw it interfering with the company’s core mission. “My big problem with Bell was he was too much involved in politics and not enough in the record business,” say
s Jim. “He was thinking it would add value to the company. Motown—they contribute, but you never hear of them personally getting involved in those kinds of things. They take away your attention from selling records.”

  “He never said no to anyone,” says Earlie. “And that was my problem with him sometimes. ‘How can we support everything that comes through the door?’ And he would say, ‘Well, this is a good cause, and this is.’ He was a humanitarian, he thought it was great to be able to give back.”

  “Al was a sucker for any promoter that walked in his office,” Jim continues. “Al didn’t differentiate between color—anybody could hustle him. Motown survived because they recognized that the product keeps the company going, not their wheeling and dealing on the side. There was too much wheeling and dealing and not enough concentration on cutting records. Bell could draw, like flies to honey, the hustlers out there. They flocked to him.”

  “We were major contributors to the NAACP, the Urban League, to PUSH,” lists Al, “the United Negro College Fund—the black colleges individually as well as the College Fund. We probably had 200 to 250 lifetime memberships in the NAACP. We were all over this country doing whatever was required for black people.”

  Remember when you were a kid on a bike atop a really great hill, and you threw yourself into it, wide-eyed with pleasure and wonder as everything’s whizzing by? Then there’s a moment you can’t pinpoint except in the past tense, that instant when control is lost, when you realize that your feet aren’t on the pedals anymore, and you have no braking power. You can jump or ride it out, but either way you hope you don’t get your teeth knocked out. One such moment came with the postman in February 1973: official correspondence from the Internal Revenue Service. The letter advised that the IRS, joined by their friends at the US Attorney’s Office, were initiating an investigation of the Stax Organization. You look at the pedals—is there any way to regain control?