Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  So where, you might ask, is there room for a new compilation? At the time of publication, I am pursuing interest from several record labels for various new Stax collections—CDs, downloads, and finger-snapping mind implants. No deals are done, but information should be available at my website, www.staxbook.com. Sorry for the tease; more to come, I hope. Getcha one, and turn it up, baby.

  At the risk of dismaying many great contemporary soul groups, I must point you to the Bo-Keys, a band that pulls from the ranks of Memphis soul greats, backed by musicians who came up listening to their records. They tour, and they’ve got CDs, and not only do they keep alive a tradition, they keep soul music originals working

  (www.thebokeys.com).

  To see this book come to life, start with our documentary, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story. Many of the book’s key players are represented there, along with some fantastic archival performances. (Watch the full version, not the one-hour edit.) There are also several DVDs of concerts from the 1967 European tour. The Stax/Volt Revue Live in Norway 1967 seems the most readily available. You’ll see the gang in their prime, and you won’t forget it. A few other recommended viewings: Dreams to Remember: The Legacy of Otis Redding features commentary from Jim, Steve, Wayne, and Zelma and Karla Redding interspersed through a fine and varied collection of Otis performances. Sam and Dave: The Original Soul Men collects many of their best TV and film performances. Wattstax is now available in an expanded thirtieth-anniversary edition that includes the originally excised “Theme from Shaft” ending, and also features audio commentary, including, interestingly, from Chuck D. And you know that great performance in Wattstax of Johnnie Taylor in the velvety-looking club? Now you can see the whole thing: Johnnie Taylor: Live at the Summit Club. It makes clear why he was such a heavy hitter.

  Tom Dowd finally got his due with a documentary about his amazing life and career: Tom Dowd & the Language of Music is a thrill for fans of all pop music since the early 1960s. Last, for a more recent look at some of the Stax artists in concert, as well as some of their Memphis soul peers, you’ll love Soul Comes Home: A Celebration of Stax Records and Memphis Soul Music. (More reading, listening, and watching is recommended in the chapter notes below.)

  When shopping for these, be sure to support your local independent retailers. If they can’t help you, try shopping online at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Your purchases will further the great community efforts of the Soulsville Foundation. Their site:

  http://shop.staxmuseum.com/.

  Further information on sources, and more stories, are available at the author’s website,

  www.staxbook.com.

  PREFACE: CITY STREETS

  “the season was always open”: This lyric is from J.B. Lenoir’s “Down in Mississippi,” a song from his 1966 album Alabama Blues. My favorite cover version is by Jim Dickinson, one of his greatest recordings from his latter years.

  1. CUTTING HEADS AND HAIR

  Marshall E. Ellis: Check out the compilation from Ellis’s label on the CD Memphis Rockabillies, Hillbillies & Honky Tonkers Vol. 2—The Erwin Records Story, Stomper Time Records, Great Britain.

  How hard could it be: Memphis seemed preternaturally inclined toward entrepreneurs: Clarence Saunders had founded the self-serve grocery there; the Frederick Smith family, after establishing a river shipping company that led to a bus service that would become Greyhound, would establish overnight air delivery with Federal Express; and Kemmons Wilson’s Holiday Inn hotel chain was just exploding as Jim was getting started.

  Jim’s wife’s uncle’s garage: This garage was probably on Burr Street, though sometimes it has been remembered as on Orchi, a couple streets away. Both are near Ellis the barber, where Chelsea meets Jackson.

  “There were a lot of people”: Grain De Sable.

  “I really got hooked”: Smithsonian.

  “They were using a little portable machine”: Hoskyns; “We couldn’t talk anybody”: Guralnick.

  “My husband, he couldn’t”: Grain De Sable.

  “He asked me if I wanted a job”: “LaGrange Native Chips Moman Talks About His Life in Music,” Georgia Rhythm (website), November 16, 2008:

  http://www.georgiarhythm.com/2008/11/lagrange-native-chips-moman-talks-about.html.

  2. A NEW PLANET

  Dewey Phillips: Recordings of Dewey Phillips on air are compiled on the CD Red, Hot, & Blue (Memphis Archives). There’s a chapter on him in It Came from Memphis, and a lot of good information in Dewey and Elvis: The Life and Times of a Rock ’n’ Roll Deejay, by Louis Cantor. You can hear some famed WDIA public service announcements on the CD WDIA: The History, the Music, the Legend.

  “We used to listen”: WFMU Duck Dunn interview.

  “He had been taking guitar lessons”: For more on guitar teacher Lynn Vernon, see It Came from Memphis.

  three bucks:

  http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=14820.

  “Jim liked all kinds of music”: Smithsonian.

  “I was in love with Hank Ballard”: Duck says, “I don’t think anybody in the South ever listened to ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ It was stupid. Bill Haley? Give me a break. ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll,’ that was Big Joe Turner, and nobody listened to Bill Haley’s version. Just compare the two. Jesus. I didn’t like the bullshit, you know?”

  “the Five Royales”: This group was very influential in shaping Steve’s guitar sound, and hence the whole Stax sound. See a great two-part history in the British magazine Juke Blues, issues 31 and 32.

  abandoned ice cream stand: “We went out to the ice cream thing one Sunday afternoon and the tape machine wasn’t working,” says Memphis guitarist Rick Ireland, who would become a guitar teacher and studio technician. Rick had an early Memphis rock band, the Regents, with Jim Dickinson. Everything was connected properly, and the needle was moving, but no sound stuck to the tape. Rick phoned an electronics expert in town. “The problem was grease,” he remembers. “The tape got too greasy running through the machine. I cleaned the capstan and the rubber roller. Burger grease was part of it, I’m sure.”

  LeMoyne Gardens: “Rich Man, Preacher Man, Soul Man: A History of South Memphis.” Prepared by Judith Johnson and Cathy Marcinko.

  3. A CAPITOL IDEA

  Willie Mitchell’s band: How great it would be to find a recording of Willie Mitchell from the Manhattan Club, or one of the West Memphis joints. I’ve always imagined the late hour that ends a good night in a small club when I hear Booker T. & the MG’s “Chinese Checkers.” The players are cocky and sure, playing with the loose confidence that says, Let’s see how loose we can keep this greasy groove.

  Other records that evoke Willie Mitchell’s scene and the West Memphis sound include “Calvin’s Boogie,” on the It Came from Memphis Vol. 2 CD; the Hi Times box set, covering Hi Records, features some early Willie Mitchell; a hard-to-find box set of the Beale Street label Home of the Blues; The Legacy of Gene “Bowlegs” Miller features later 1960s material, but sometimes his club roots pop through; and there are choice early Memphis tracks on The Complete Meteor Blues, R&B and Gospel Recordings.

  Al Jackson Jr.: In Stax Fax, March 1969, Al says he learned drums from his father’s drummer, Houston Stokes, whom he’d later replace.

  “Jim Stewart was standing”: Smithsonian Institution.

  Robert Tally: See It Came from Memphis for more on Tally and his influence on Wayne, Duck, and the others.

  “[W]hen the black man”: From James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Keenan. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

  SANITATION MEN WANT MORE PAY: Tri-State Defender, February 6, 1960.

  RECORDS FOR EVERYONE: Tri-State Defender, May 21, 1960.

  “‘What’d I Say’ by Ray Charles”: If you’re new to Ray Charles, there’s a world of pleasure ahead. Try the album Genius + Soul = Jazz. I’ve also enjoyed the box Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings. (But you almost can’t go wrong with Ray.) Jim Stew
art hit his Ray Charles lick on an early side, Barbara Stephens’s “Wait a Minute.”

  Robert “Buster” Williams: For more on Buster Williams, see It Came from Memphis.

  an Atlantic Records promotions man: Marty Simon worked for music sales, and he spoke to Norman Rubin at Atlantic.

  “mushroomed”: Respect Yourself documentary.

  5. A BANKER AND A GAMBLER

  “We were just kids”: “put Gilbert and Floyd with Packy”: The Mar-Keys are among the great storied bands, and several members are great storytellers: Don Nix, Road Stories and Recipes; Wayne Jackson, In My Wildest Dreams; and Jerry Lee “Smoochy” Smith, The Real Me. See the chapter “Kicks and Spins and All the Flips” in It Came from Memphis.

  “My dad was going through financial stuff”: WFMU interview.

  “where the splice is”: The dissenting opinion: “Everything that came out of Stax during the first four years,” says Jim, “there was not a splice in the tape. It was all live ’cause none of us knew how to splice.”

  In September 1961, Satellite changed its name: “Satellite Records Switches to Stax,” Billboard, September 11, 1961, p. 13. The logo was created by Mar-Keys vocalist Ronnie “Angel” Stoots, who would design several early Stax album covers.

  “We were surrounded by talent”: Barney Hoskyns.

  “Chips would rather”: WFMU interview.

  “I was supposed to get a third”: Nashville Scene (online), “Chips Moman: The Cream Interview,” August 17, 2012. Chips is also quoted in Memphis Boys, by Roben Jones: “‘I had twenty-five percent—I thought,’ Chips said sadly. ‘They owed me my share of a million dollars they’d made that year—’61, ’62.’”

  6. “GREEN ONIONS”

  “I’d pick Booker up”: Unidentified audio interview in the archives of the Stax Museum.

  Jim suggested Steve move his punctuating chords: Leo Fender was a country music fan. His Fender guitars have been essential in defining the sound of popular music from the 1950s on. They were designed to capture the solid wood body’s resonance, and to be heard in a loud 1950s dance hall; their sound cuts through. Soon Steve got a Fender Telecaster “probably a ’62 or ’63. I bought it new.” The Telecaster has all the versatility and a bit more oomph than the Esquire. Steve went from a Fender Harvard amp to a Fender Super Reverb. Duck played his Fender Precision bass through a 2x15 Standel amp. A young B.B. King got raw, gutbucket sounds out of the Telecaster, and country artists drew cleaner, more refined sounds. George Harrison, of the Beatles, played a Fender.

  “We’ll move out into the county”: Commercial Appeal, October 4, 1961.

  O.Z. Evers, the men’s representative: In February 1960, O.Z. Evers was signing sanitation workers to the Teamsters union. He wanted the city to raise their wage from ninety-six cents an hour to a $1.65 an hour, and he wanted African-Americans in supervisory positions. He was willing to compromise if the city would guarantee a full week’s pay. Working with the Teamsters, he drew 200 sanitation workers to a rally in March of 1960, and three months later had 900 signatures on union cards—three quarters of the department. But then Loeb met with the Teamsters officials. The previous year, when Evers had run for a seat on the city commission, he’d been disqualified on a technicality; when Loeb convinced the Teamsters to abandon the African-American workers, Evers quit his effort and applied himself to smaller spheres. The city was too crooked to beat. Evers was a postal worker, and they were one of the first unions to organize under President Kennedy; he also ran the city’s Unity League, an activist organization for workers. The Chicago Defender named him to the 1959 Honor Roll. (Memphis African-American attorney Russell Sugarmon was also named that year.)

  At a truck stop in Alabama: Freeman, Otis!, p. 122.

  “another company in Detroit”: The collection Soulsville Sings Hitsville is as good a Stax collection as Motown. It gets under the surface of both—not the obvious Stax players, not the obvious Motown songs.

  “It wasn’t a preconceived kind of goal”: Joseph Weiler, “Stax Records: The Dream That Died,” Commercial Appeal, February 8, 1976.

  7. WALK RIGHT IN

  Walk Right In: In 1963, while the Rooftop Singers were having a hit with a jug band song by Gus Cannon, “Walk Right In,” someone at Stax realized that Gus was living in Memphis, and he was brought into the studio. The album Walk Right In combines his performances (accompanied by Will Shade from the Memphis jug band!) with storytelling and some oral history.

  “Everybody was tired”: Respect Yourself documentary.

  The driver’s name was Otis Redding: Dive into Otis! The Definitive Otis Redding, a four-CD box set, if you can find it. Any Otis compilation will be rewarding. Check out the energy of bandmate Eddie Kirk’s “The Hawg, Part 1,” and imagine an Otis Redding that took off from full speed. I’m looking forward to Jonathan Gould’s forthcoming Otis biography, and whatever new musical releases it will prompt.

  water-well driller: Stanley Booth, Rythm Oil, pp. 76–77.

  broader education: Booker didn’t get a music degree, but he took advantage of the musical opportunities, telling me, “I spent hours and hours and hours in their music library listening to composers from five hundred years ago, one hundred years ago, and I learned the emotional lessons that were taught. A piece like ‘Finlandia’ by Sibelius, how does a man write that? His country has been taken and belongs to another country. When an artist can put an emotion in a piece of music and a listener feels the same emotion, then it’s been transferred. That’s just a real true thing that you can’t touch.”

  “‘Dowd, you’re going to Memphis’”: “When I came down to Memphis,” says Tom Dowd, “it was like turning back the hands of time fifteen or twenty years. The people down here were growing up in an era that had already gone by. In New York, we had googobs of radio stations, AM and FM. We had stations that were broadcasting Chinese, Greek, Hungarian, Polish. On FM you had classical music and an occasional live performance. Down here, you had preachers saying, ‘You send me a dollar fifty, I’ll give you a family bible, b-i-b-l-e, and if you send me another fifty cents, I’ll give you a fancy packet of chrysanthemum seeds and you can have your family b-i-b-l-e.’ I was thinking it was a comedy record! They’d be listening to some country station, and they don’t even notice how gentle the swing is from the last country record into a couple of blues records. They were being exposed to a different culture. Which is what affected how these people played.”

  clacking his teeth: Rufus’s technique was a way of producing; it was so weird, it freed the player to find Rufus’s realm of funk.

  “‘I’ll worry about the stereo’ ”: Tom Dowd gave me this advice: “Ultimately, when you’re recording, you’re storing information. If you record it in mono, it’s gonna be mono for the rest of its doggone life. The newest way you can find to store information, you have a chance later of putting it into the state of the art.”

  Estelle saw advantages to the mono setup, saying, “We survived on that one-track machine until about ’63 or ’64. But cutting on a one-track wasn’t such a disadvantage because the singer felt the musicians and the musicians felt the singer. They did it like they were onstage. That’s how you got the feeling.”

  8. THE GOLDEN GLOW

  “Pain in My Heart”: Otis and manager Phil Walden affixed their names to “Pain in My Heart,” though the song was virtually identical to “Ruler of My Heart,” written by New Orleans producer Allen Toussaint and performed by Irma Thomas. It was nothing a judge couldn’t settle, and Redding and Walden’s names were soon replaced by Toussaint’s (or by his pen name, Naomi Neville).

  Not giving proper credit: Freeman, Otis!, p. 99. The provenance of “Respect” is also a matter of dispute. In Otis! (pp. 140–141), the author quotes Percy Welch, a Macon musician, telling a story about Otis’s valet Speedo Sims singing “Respect” as a ballad, and written by an unnamed Macon guitarist. “Every time Speedo would get in the studio, his voice would crack up. We’d done recorded ‘Respect’ five or si
x times, and each time it’d get worse and worse . . . [Otis told Speedo,] ‘You don’t need to do that tune, I need to do it it. You let me cut it, I’ll give you credit.’ Speedo should have made him sign a contract.”

  “Al Jackson was the pulse”: “Al always let you know where the one was,” says Steve, referring to the time signature in the bars. “Whether it was twelve bars or eight or sixteen or thirty-two bars, he would always give you that downbeat.”

  The following information on Al Jackson’s drum gear comes from drummer Jim Payne’s book, Give the Drummers Some!

  (http://www.funkydrummer.com/JPpages/shop.html):

  “Al usually used a Rogers drum kit, sometimes with a Ludwig 400 or Ludwig Acrolite snare. The snare mics included Neumann KM84, RCA 77DX, ElectroVoice RE-15, Shure 545. The kick was often mic’ed with an RE-20. The snare was sometimes detuned until the head was floppy and then tightened with the snare’s built-in damper. The hi-hat was never mic’ed. Steve told Jim Payne, ‘Al Jackson never changed his heads unless he broke one. The same thing with the bass and guitar. If we broke a string we changed it. If we didn’t, it never got changed. Al never changed those drums. He had a Ludwig and Rogers mix ’n’ match. He had a medium size kick drum, 20-inch, and he had a Rogers floor tom, grey pearl, and then a little 12-inch tom over head.’”