Respect Yourself

by Robert Gordon

  Steve suggested:

  http://www.vintageguitar.com/3658/steve-cropper.

  To write with Otis, Steve bought a second Telecaster, “a good used one, because Otis always tuned to a chord, open tuning. Otis was a one-fingered guitar player, so in his songs, there are almost no minor chords—because he didn’t know how to make that form. For things like ‘Try a Little Tenderness,’ I played in standard tuning; for things like ‘Ole Man Trouble,’ the intro was all done with a chord on the second Tele.”

  “I never would have approached it”: Freeman, Otis!, p. 117.

  9. SOUL MEN

  The two men: For more on Sam and Dave’s long-term and ultimately contentious relationship, see Dave Marsh’s Sam and Dave: An Oral History. For more on Sam’s career, see

  http://www.sammoore.net.

  at the King of Hearts: When Atlantic execs Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler walked in, Sam and Dave were performing the Ben E. King hit (later a number one for Aretha Franklin) “Don’t Play That Song”—which was cowritten by Ertegun. Sam remembers being openly skeptical that they could possibly have been playing a song written by the genteel and tailored Turkish gentleman before him. Ahmet Ertegun—down-home funky within—also produced “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-De” and wrote “Sweet Sixteen.”

  white belt, white shoes, pink socks, and bald head: “There was a fad going around among black musicians to straighten your hair,” Isaac remembers about the “konk” in the early 1960s. “It was a pain to keep up. So I decided to grow me a fresh crop of natural hair. I went into King’s barbershop around from Stax and said, ‘Cut it all off.’ People were saying, ‘Look at that baldheaded guy with a beard.’ I liked being different, so I decided to keep it.”

  the sanitation workers were invisible men: See chapter 15 notes for more on the sanitation department’s conflict with the city.

  Wilson Pickett was a popular singer: For Wilson Pickett, I’ve found the A Man and a Half two-CD collection to be quite satisfying.

  Stax would receive: My specifics on the Stax and Atlantic deal come from Bowman, Soulsville, pp. 59–60.

  10. A ROCKET IN WING TIPS

  the MG’s and Isaac supplied the music: The MG’s And Now! is often overlooked. Good grooves, and also an example of the early stereo recordings with the individual instruments sent heavily to one side or the other, only the mike leakage giving them a bit of stereo balance. The live recording of the 5/4 Ballroom concert is a stone killer: Funky Broadway: Stax Revue Live at the 5/4 Ballroom. Outrageous versions of “Boot-Leg” and “Do the Dog.”

  The Los Angeles recordings by Packy and the MG’s have been released on a vinyl album, Hole in the Wall, and attributed to the Packers. Packy’s other recordings, from various studios around Memphis, have been compiled by Light in the Attic Records on Late, Late Party 1965–1967. “Hip Pocket” features Johnny Keyes on kazoo. Johnny and Doris on Packy:

  http://www.emusic.com/music-news/interview/an-oral-history-of-charles-packy-axtons-late-late-party.

  Carla Thomas was at Howard University: With Carla at college, Stax was looking for female vocalists. Wendy Rene came in with the Drapels, and then released “After Laughter Comes Tears,” a hit before its time. Later it was sampled by the Wu Tang Clan, among others. The recent After Laughter Comes Tears includes her great unreleased tracks. In the zoo of great Rufus Thomas songs, one of my favorites is from 1964, “Can Your Monkey Do the Dog.”

  “More important than the record”: Author’s conversation.

  11. KINGS AND QUEENS OF SOUL

  one of the greatest soul music albums ever recorded: There’s an expanded Otis Blue that includes alternate takes and live versions. Note the flip side of “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” “Just One More Day.” Each instrument gleams in flickering candlelight.

  “Every artist in [San Francisco]”: Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, p. 174.

  “There’s a gospel tune, ‘You Don’t Know Like I Know . . .’”: From the songwriting contract for “You Don’t Know Like I Know” between Hayes/Porter and East, dated September 23, 1965: They were paid a nickel per copy sold, and were entitled to 50 percent of any option money.

  “We had one heater”: The heater was a gas heater, and when I was talking to Deanie Parker about it, she said, “Otis would leave his [dental] partial on the heater and I’d have to pack it up and send it to Macon.” That’s family!

  “Al Bell saw the potential”: Mike Ragogna, the Huffington Post, June 15, 2011:

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ragogna/van-hunts-free-june-downl_b_877200.html.

  12. UNUSUAL SUCCESS

  Sam and Dave weren’t harmonizers: Experience Sam and Dave through these DVDs: Sam and Dave: The Original Soul Men collects a variety of performances, and The Sam and Dave Show: 1967 is a live show with guests.

  Ardent Studio, an up-and-coming facility in town: The Ardent studio and label suggests lots of good music. Check out Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story. Some of the early white Memphis bands—rock and soul groups—are compiled on the two-volume set, A History of Garage and Frat Bands in Memphis, 1960–1975.

  Their credulity was further tested: The Beatles wanted to come to Stax, and you can hear Stax’s love affair with the Beatles on Stax Does the Beatles.

  “‘the Beatles are coming’”: Don Nix: “I was probably the biggest Beatlemaniac in the world. I always said, ‘If I ever meet the Beatles I’m going to ask them how they got that guitar sound on the intro to ‘Lucy in the Sky.’ And I finally met George Harrison.” George had Don assemble the backing vocalists at the Concert for Bangladesh. “Before I could ask, he started asking me questions about Stax. He wanted to know more about Stax than I did about Beatles.”

  vacuum cleaners: Jones, Memphis Boys, p. 5.

  13. FATBACK CACCIATORE

  England and across Europe: There are many good visual recordings of the 1967 European tour. The Stax/Volt Revue Live in Norway 1967 is a whole night from the best seat in the house.

  the lemonade came syrupy: Brown, Otis Redding: Try a Little Tenderness.

  That summer, Al was promoted: Billboard, August 19, 1967, p. 6.

  14. WHITE CARNATIONS

  William Bell: William Bell’s first album, Soul of a Bell, collects the best of his early career.

  “Hip Hug Her”: Booker says, “That’s probably Duck’s most aggressive outing and the sound is just incredible. It’s almost breaking up but it’s not. The bass leads the band. The guitar and bass are playing the same thing, which is a sound I’ve stuck with in my mind. It beefs up the bottom end, it makes a strong statement for a dance record. I used it later with Rita Coolidge on ‘Higher and Higher.’”

  transforming a standard into a truly personal vision: “If I had to pick the best record that Stax ever made,” Jim Stewart says, “it would be ‘Try a Little Tenderness.’ It has everything that Stax is or was about. It exemplifies what Stax really was, that one record. And when I hear it today, I still get that same feeling that I got when we rolled that tape in the studio.” Stanley Booth was at Stax during Otis’s last days; see his Rythm Oil.

  “‘Try a Little Tenderness’ may be the greatest horn introduction of any record that’s ever been made,” says Wayne. “That little riff just came off the top of Otis’s head, and it went into our hearts and onto that tape.” Al suggests just the right optimism in the second verse, tapping the wood side of the drum. Duck says, “That song has got to be Al’s. If Al ever created one, it’s that one.” (Freeman, Otis!, 156.)

  “Mable John”: Mable, who is Little Willie John’s big sister, recorded at Motown before joining Stax in 1966. “We would work at the Lorraine Motel,” she says. “I was expecting Stax to do me like Motown. You walk in, you’re told, ‘Sing this.’ But Hayes and Porter would sit with me and I would talk to them about my life, my children, my hobbies. And all the time I’m doing that, they’re listening to my voice. Isaac would begin to play the piano, because he was getting into my skin. Isaac had a touch that
’s from heaven. David would start writing, and they would jell like toast and jam.” A recent Mable John compilation, Stay Out of the Kitchen, manages not to include her biggest hit, “Your Good Thing Is About to End,” but does include much unreleased Stax material.

  expansion into St. Louis: “Stax Expands with St. Louis, Memphis Move,” Billboard, March 23, 1968, p. 10.

  “After that”: Jim Stewart, Respect Yourself documentary.

  “Soul Man”: I like Duck’s perspective: “‘Soul Man’ is almost Bo Diddley, but in the middle we hold the tonic and Steve does his guitar fills.” WFMU interview.

  “When ‘Soul Man’ becomes”: Jon Landau, Rolling Stone, January 20, 1968, p. 18.

  “He was so tired”: Freeman, Otis!, p. 194.

  consider his relationships: When Otis recorded his protégé Arthur Conley, he went to Rick Hall’s Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals instead of to Stax. Muscle Shoals was nearer to Atlanta, but Stax was Otis’s home. So it’s hard not to read meaning into the decision. Several people claim Otis told them he was considering a change in management. Wexler, in his autobiography (p. 202), writes, “Two weeks before his death, he called and asked me to produce his next album. He wanted to move from the Stax sound to the more polished and bigger sonorities of, let’s say, Ray Charles. I was flattered out of my mind—but worried to death about the political implication with Jim Stewart. ‘No sweat, Jerry,’ Otis reassured me. ‘I’ll take care of that part of it . . . There was no serenity in the posthumous release [of “Dock of the Bay”]. The ocean breeze and the washing of waves on shore did nothing to ease the pain of his passing. There has never been the slightest solace in it. Even now, when I hear ‘Dock of the Bay,’ I feel a rush of resentment and anger.”

  “He dissected the Sgt. Pepper”: Freeman, Otis!, p. 187.

  Things kept getting better: While at those last sessions, an invitation for Otis came from Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, a tour of Vietnam in support of the troops; no date was set, but the recognition felt great.

  “‘See ya on Monday’ ”: “Then I Watch ’Em Roll Away Again,” the Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2013, page D7. Shout-out to band programs in the public schools, and to the Bar-Kays’ band teacher, Harry Winfield, at Porter Jr. High School in Memphis. Shout-out to WDIA disc jockey A.C. “Mooha” Williams, who formed the Teen Town Singers, created great radio public service announcements, and who, the Monday morning after the deaths of Otis and the Bar-Kays, read “a touching tribute on his Monday morning radio program.” (Memphis World, December 16, 1967, p. 1.)

  “They did the Upbeat TV”: The day before their plane crash, Otis and the Bar-Kays were on a Cleveland TV show, Upbeat! One complete song, “Respect,” is in the Respect Yourself documentary, and it may be the most poignant performance you’ll ever see.

  “told us he couldn’t crank it up”: Bob Mehr, “Trumpet Player Bears Scars of Deadly Crash,” Commercial Appeal, December 9, 2007.

  “I remember waking up”: Higgins, “Eyewitness Tells of Redding’s Death.”

  Otis was seated in the front: Ibid.

  “I remember the coroner told the nurse”: Ibid.

  “never be back”: Freeman, Otis!, p. 216.

  “Trying to work on something like that”: Steve brought out the guitar amp he’d used on “Green Onions,” a Fender Harvard, to record overdubs on “Dock.” Wexler got the mix and thought Otis’s vocal was too low. Steve had sent a stereo mix, so he replaced it with the mono mix. That’s what was released on January 8; it reached number one on both charts on March 16 and stayed there for four weeks.

  “Police skin divers said they were unable”: Higgins, Sepia.

  “We are witnessing”: “Thousands Jam Church for Funeral of Three,” Tri-State Defender, December 23, 1967, p. 1.

  The line of cars: Memphis World, December 23, 1967.

  “Otis was not only an artist”: Dreams to Remember DVD.

  15. “BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN”

  “I didn’t know it”: In an anecdote decades later, Wexler’s condescension toward his Memphis friends comes clearer. During a mid-1960s visit, they all left from the studio for dinner. Wanting to impress their visitor, Jim and Estelle chose a fancy place with a revolving floor atop one of the city’s tallest buildings—but were turned away at the door because of Al Bell’s skin color. Wexler was embarrassed—for himself and for Al—and disdainful of Jim and Estelle. “It shows a certain imprudence,” Wexler says. “They didn’t have the vision and the wit to know this could be embarrassing.”

  They’d lost Otis: Stax released two notable tributes to Otis. William Bell’s “A Tribute to a King” captures the sadness and heartfelt longing that the studio felt. “Big Bird,” a collaboration between Eddie Floyd and Booker, is a an exuberant howl to someone departed. At the crossroads of soul and rock and roll, it’s one of Stax’s greatest triumphs.

  Events leading to Dr. King’s assassination: My information on the sanitation department’s long struggle with the city comes from the newspaper clippings in the Memphis Room at the Memphis–Shelby County Public Library. However, before immersing myself there, I got renewed enthusiasm from reading Going Down Jericho Road by Michael Honey, about Martin Luther King’s work in Memphis. (Also check out Honey’s Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle.) The other essential book for the ’68 strike is Joan Beifuss’s At the River I Stand.

  The documentary At the River I Stand focuses on T.O. Jones and the union’s work to settle the strike. A newer documentary, MLK: The Assassination Tapes, is an immersion piece, taking you into Memphis during the strike, and into the manhunt. I Am a Man: From Memphis, a Lesson in Life is an engaging, ruminative visit with Elmore Nickelberry, a 1968 sanitation worker, forty years later:

  http://www.iamamanthemovie.com.

  “It was horrible”: “Witness Tells of Man’s Death,” Press Scimitar, February 2, 1968, p. 10.

  Larry Payne: “I was in my living room watching ‘As the World Turns,’” Payne’s mother says. “A lady ran in and told me Larry had been shot by the police. I ran out. I ran to touch him. The police would not let me touch him. He said, ‘Get back, nigger.’ He put the barrel of the gun right into my stomach. I could feel it.” Officers said Payne had a knife in his hands. His mother’s last image was of her son lying on his back with both hands outstretched over his head. “He didn’t have anything in his hands.” She said there was no knife on the ground. A grand jury declined to indict the officer. He faced no charges. Later, Memphis attorney Irvin Salky filed a civil rights lawsuit against the police department. Police never produced a knife as evidence, claiming the weapon was mistakenly collected with older evidence from the police property room and “it was dumped into the Mississippi River along with other weapons,” says Salky. “We had a lot of skepticism over that.”

  (http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/mar/28/mother-grieves-sons-death.)

  he leaned forward: See for yourself in the documentary At the River I Stand.

  16. “SOUL LIMBO”

  an assumption of power: In Phyl Garland’s 1969 book The Sound of Soul, we get a firsthand look as the Gulf & Western–funded takeoff begins. Several record collections cover Stax’s second period. Never to Be Forgotten is ten vinyl singles (and a download) in a nifty box with photo-heavy, appealing liner notes. “A love letter,” they call it, to some of Stax’s lesser-known artists. Nobody Wins digs deeper into the archives, featuring previously unreleased tracks and the more familiar.

  first published statement on Black Power: Carmichael and Thelwell, p. 535. This became the book-length essay Black Power, published in 1967. Following Dr. King’s assassination, the rhetoric ticked up: “We have to recognize who the major enemy is,” Carmichael declaimed a few months after the assassination. Citing the way European whites had treated the “red man,” and the way the United States was presently treating the Vietnamese, he continued, “The major enemy is not your brother! The major enemy is the honkie and
his institutions of racism!” (Hilliard, This Side of Glory, p. 174; the speech is from the Oakland Auditorium, October 21, 1968.) For half a decade there’d been little response to Malcolm X’s stated position: “My stand,” Malcolm X said, “is really the same as that of twenty-two million so-called Negroes. It is not a stand for integration. The stand is that our people want complete freedom, justice, and equality. That is, respect and recognition as human beings. That is the objective of every black [person] in this country.” From Ready for Revolution, by Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell.

  third-largest industry in Memphis: “Memphis Gets Earful of the Memphis Sound,” Press Scimitar, March 27, 1968. The article also notes that the local pressing plant, Plastic Products, is shipping an average of 150,000 single records a day, or fifty million a year.

  “It was a continuous problem”: Respect Yourself documentary.

  One associate said: Joe Mulherin talked about Baylor’s eyes.

  G&W was also negotiating: James Cortese, “Stax Brass Expects Sale to Open Many New Doors,” Commercial Appeal, May 19, 1968. The same article notes that the new studio improvements are costing about $50,000.

  PARAMOUNT TO BUY: Billboard, May 18, 1968, p. 3. The formal announcement was May 13. Also, Bill E. Burk, “Hollywood Company Acquires Stax-Volt,” Press Scimitar, May 13, 1968.

  NATRA’s convention: Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music, p. 382.

  “the nation’s problems”: Billboard, August 10, 1968, p. 1, by Paul Ackerman