The back cover image on Be Altitude: Respect Yourself shows Pops, Mavis, Cleotha, and Yvonne clasping upraised hands on the wing of a Delta 747, as if to presage the success of “I’ll Take You There.” It was the album’s second single, and on the heels of “Respect Yourself,” it turned the Staples into pop stars. “I’ll Take You There” rose to number 1 on both the pop and R&B charts in the spring of 1972. Here was tangible evidence that the Staples’ music was cutting across lines of genre and race, and achieving the kind of universality that Pops Staples and Al Bell had envisioned for the group.
Stax marketed the Staples’ topical, boundary-busting music with ads that declared, “The Message that Rock Music is Still Looking For.” In the mid- to late ’60s, soul artists including Otis Redding and Sly Stone made major inroads with the rock audience. But in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination and the rise of the black power movement, walls began to go up between musical genres. A more strident, urban-centric brand of soul arose in the early ’70s, with harder funk rhythms and harsher, more realistic lyrics that spoke specifically to the black experience and a black audience.
But the Staples, who had been playing folk and rock clubs since the ’60s, were drawing bigger, mixed audiences in theaters and arenas in the wake of Be Altitude. The family was used to living out of suitcases since the late ’50s, but demand skyrocketed in 1972. A spring tour saw them playing arenas and auditoriums in Philadelphia, Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas, and five-night club residencies in Cleveland and New York. In June and July, they packed an astonishing thirty-seven shows into thirty-one days, with only four days off.
The Rolling Stones tried to line up the Staple Singers as an opening act for a much-anticipated 1972 American tour to promote the U.K. quintet’s masterpiece, Exile on Main St. The Stones knew the Staples’ music well; in ’65, Keith Richards acknowledged nicking Pops’s guitar riff for a rewrite of “The Last Time,” and Mick Jagger touted “I’ll Take You There” in interviews. The Stones were the biggest rock band in the world, with a tour that would play arenas and stadiums across North America. An opening slot would’ve expanded the Staples’ reach.
But the numbers didn’t add up to Pops. The Stones offered the Staples $500 a night, said the group’s manager, Rik Gunnell. The offer “is a total bloody insult,” Gunnell told Variety magazine. “To be offered $500 for an act that sells a million singles—that’s nerve. It’s OK for a brand-new group starting off, but for a group that gets $7,000 a night suddenly to work for $500 a night? Pop Staples is 57 years old. He doesn’t want to work more than two or three years. He’d like to retire with some security.”
Gunnell noted that the Stones tour would likely bring in more than $2 million in gross revenue. The Staples would have to divvy up their $500 fee among eight people: the four family members, three backing musicians, and a roadie, plus take care of their own lodging and expenses.
“We were thrilled to hear the Stones are longtime fans and loved the idea of working with them, even though it meant holding off on a lot of important dates,” Pops told Variety. “We really felt honored until our management was told that we’d be paid just $500 a night for a tour that will gross millions. Frankly, we felt insulted. I’d like to think Mick Jagger doesn’t know about this. I’ve never spoken to Jagger and I’d like to think there’s some sort of mistake, but [Stones manager] Peter Rudge was very definite in his offer and we’re very definite in saying, ‘No.’ We love music and audiences. That’s our life, but we don’t like being used.”
Jagger says his memory of the business machinations behind the ’72 tour are vague. “I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that long before that we were big fans of the Staple Singers,” he says. “I always liked them since I was a kid. They were the first gospel that I listened to, along with Rosetta Tharpe. Both those women singers—Rosetta and Mavis Staples—had quite a big impact on me. We were very influenced by them early on. Pops’s tremolo-style guitar playing was unique. They were very influential, not just on us, but on a lot of our contemporaries in England.”
The growing attention from the likes of the Stones as well as secular audiences and commercial radio irritated some influential members of the gospel community, including artists the Staples once considered friends, particularly the Reverend James Cleveland and Shirley Caesar.
“The Staple Singers would like to give the impression that they’re still gospel singers, but they’re not,” Cleveland said in the Journal of Gospel Music. “They’ve decided to do message songs and Mavis has even done a pop album which has no religious things on it at all. I’ve known the Staples all my life. As little kids we grew up in Chicago together when their father was working in the stockyards. . . . There was never anybody else around who sang like the Staple Singers. They had a fresh, Mississippi sound. I don’t personally feel that in their case it was necessary to change over from gospel to rhythm and blues, except to make more money, because they had climbed to the very top of the gospel ladder.”
Bill Carpenter says the backlash had been brewing for several years. “When Mavis did ‘A House Is Not a Home’ on her solo record, she was being called a ‘backslider’ by some people in the gospel world,” he says. “That’s when the Staples’ audience really began to change. People would come to the shows who didn’t have an issue with any of that. That was an important lesson for the Staples: They still had an audience even though a lot of people in their own community were complaining. A lot of gospel artists I work with now are very jealous of the Staple Singers’ legacy. They feel they don’t deserve the recognition and fame they’ve received as a ‘gospel’ act. It’s sad.”
But the Staples had merged their gospel background with a more secular perspective years before, particularly after allying themselves with Martin Luther King. Pops heard the complaints that the Staples were making a “mockery of gospel,” but in an interview with Black Stars magazine he was resolute about the direction of the family’s music: “Our main aim and objective is to bridge the gap between blacks themselves and get them to stick together and stop ripping one another off,” he said. “We need a lot of help. We’re a downtrodden people still suffering from the horrors of slavery. We need a force that can fix our hearts and regulate our minds and make us respect ourselves. Now, King Jesus can help us. He is the answer. But we got to and we can help ourselves, too. We got to start by loving ourselves and loving one another.”
The message was distilled into bumper sticker choruses and sticky pop hooks—“bubblegum,” in the opinion of Anthony Heilbut. But it was hardly the “devil’s music,” as some of the Staples’ critics claimed. On Be Altitude, Pops praised “Jesus Christ the Superstar,” and Mavis proclaimed, “I’m just another soldier of love.”
Stax filtered Pops’s words into a full-page concert advertisement: “Tonight the Staple Singers. Doing it the way they’ve always done it. The right way. Call it gospel, rock, rhythm and blues, or just call it what it is. The Truth. Pure and simple.”
The Polynesian Palace in Las Vegas took a slightly different twist in advertising a gig by the new chart toppers: “The Staple Singers: Three Groovin’ gals plus ‘the big man’ rock it heavy with acid-action!”
Somewhere between those twin poles of hyperbole, the Staples were becoming one of the biggest acts Stax had ever produced, in the same league as Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding. The Memphis label opened a West Coast promotion office in Los Angeles and in July landed two songs on the U.K. charts simultaneously for the first time: Frederick Knight’s “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long” and the Staples’ “I’ll Take You There.”
As a way of consolidating and celebrating Stax’s gains, an empowered Al Bell set his sights on creating a massive festival for the label’s acts in Los Angeles that would be turned into a documentary film.
Wattstax was staged on August 20, 1972, the final day of the Watts Summer Festival at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in South Central L.A. Bell picked the venue for several reasons, some symbolic, some practical. Watts was the site of a massive race riot in 1965 and had never fully recovered. It left thirty-four dead, most of them blacks, and more than a thousand injured, and led to four thousand arrests. Tens of millions of dollars in damage was reported as fires raged for days. Though the violence was widely condemned as a rebuke of the civil rights movement’s largely nonviolent approach, Senator Robert Kennedy saw it as a fed-up community’s desperate response to a seemingly intractable problem: “There is no point in telling Negroes to observe the law. It has almost always been used against them.”
By 1972, little had changed. The Watts Summer Festival was created to raise money for the destitute community. Bell wanted to help by explicitly tying his label to the cause, and to show the world that something good could emerge from what many saw as a turning point in the civil rights struggle.
Of course, there was more to Bell’s agenda than charity. Los Angeles was the heart of the film industry, and he saw the Watts festival as an opportunity to showcase his artists on a massive multimedia platform. He worked out a deal with two Los Angeles radio stations to broadcast the event live, and he hired Mel Stuart to direct the movie. Stuart was an experienced documentarian who had most recently directed Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. To give the music texture and context, he suggested tying in the concert performances with voices of ordinary people (and a few actors) from the streets of Los Angeles. An up-and-coming comedian named Richard Pryor was hired to serve as the MC for this Greek chorus of ghetto commentators.
Stuart, who was white, in turn worked at Bell’s behest with a crew and staff that was largely black; forty-five of the forty-eight cameras were operated by African Americans. The security staff was entirely black, and unarmed. And the vast majority of the 112,000 people who attended were also African Americans. Claims were made that this would be the largest single gathering of black people since the 1963 March on Washington.
Tickets were $1, but many in the audience were admitted free. The inner-city communities were sinking beneath a mountain of poverty and neglect in the early ’70s, and the optimism of the civil rights era had hardened into a more defiant stance. Public Enemy’s Chuck D saw 1972 as a crossroads for the black community and the black power movement. “We fought for something . . . now where are we heading to?” he muses in the commentary for the Wattstax movie. “I saw a little bit of cracking of the edges around the term [black power].”
When Kim Weston sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at about 3 p.m. to officially launch the event, the crowd sat and chatted as if it were just background noise. A series of speakers followed, topped by Jesse Jackson, the Staple Singers advocate and now fellow Stax Records recording artist who would serve as one of the festival’s MCs. He looked out at the vast crowd and dropped in a series of Jesse-isms that framed the event not just as a concert but as a state of the African-American union.
“Something new has happened in America,” he said, his voice rising. “The government has not changed, politics have not changed, but something has happened to the black man in America. Nation time has come. We say that we may be in the slum, but the slum is not in us. We may be in the prison, but the prison is not in us. In Watts we have shifted from ‘burn, baby, burn’ to ‘learn, baby, learn.’ ”
With Bell standing next to him, the “country preacher” raised a fist and beckoned the audience to do the same. “I may be poor, but I am somebody,” Jackson declared. “I may be on welfare, but I am somebody. I may be unskilled, but I am somebody. I am black, beautiful, proud, I must be respected, I must be protected. I am God’s child.”
Weston then sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which Jackson introduced by its unofficial title in the black community, “The Black National Anthem.” The poem had been set to music at the turn of the century, and in this charged time it had usurped the national anthem itself as the song that most accurately reflected Jackson’s notion of a black nation within a nation. “Let us march on till victory is won,” Weston sang, her voice cracking with emotion as she reached for notes just beyond her range.
It set the tone for the Staple Singers, who took the stage minutes later as a late addition to the bill. The group was in huge demand and had been booked for a run of dates at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas with Sammy Davis Jr. But Davis canceled the first of his two shows that day to make a campaign appearance for President Richard Nixon; a few days later he wound up in Miami for the Republican National Convention, where he would hug Nixon and stir nationwide controversy. Davis’s last-minute change of plans freed the Staples to fly to Los Angeles that morning in time for Wattstax. The group’s performance was further complicated by the absence of Yvonne, who was back home in Chicago recovering from appendix surgery. Yet even though they were at less than full strength, the Staple Singers proved to be a potent introduction to the day’s six-hour feast of music.
“Heavy Makes You Happy (Sha-Na-Boom Boom)” opened the set and got the crowd moving, a sea of Technicolor bell-bottoms and hot pants, paisley dresses, zebra-striped flop hats, and extravagant Afros. “Are You Sure?” followed, then Pops took over for some front-porch wisdom on “I Like the Things About Me.”
“There was a time I wished my hair was fine / And I can remember when I wished my lips were thin,” sang Pops, a white safari outfit matching his white muttonchop sideburns, but now “I like the things about me that I once despised.”
About two minutes in, he requested a brief interlude to “rap awhile” about black identity, which he turned into a classic Pops mix of seriousness, levity, and empowerment. Despite a huge disparity in schooling and opportunity, he extolled African-American accomplishment in everything from medicine to music. “I want to tell you one thing. No nationality could go through what the black people went through and still survive like we do.” He echoed Jackson’s exhortation of “I am somebody,” quoted James Brown’s “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,” praised “Black Moses” Isaac Hayes and pioneering black heart surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, and laughed about his fine natural self, right down to his sideburns. “We got our natural things!”
Pops, Mavis, and Cleotha surely recognized what the festival represented not just to them and their label, but to African Americans. “We felt it was a good song to sing at that event,” Mavis told the Guardian newspaper. “With Pops saying, ‘There was a time I wished my hair was fine.’ Well, no. Not any more. We want our hair the way we came here with it—nappy. That’s what was happening. Black people were showing they were proud to be black. We were singing songs to lift the people.”
The Staples rolled into “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.” “Don’t you want to go?” Mavis sang and extended her hand as if ready to lead the march to a better place. A bevy of performers would follow—Eddie Floyd, the Bar-Kays, David Porter, Albert King, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas—but none would command the stage as long as the Staples, with the exception of headliner Isaac Hayes.
Later, the crowd spilled onto the football field from the stands at the behest of Rufus Thomas, who was doing the Funky Chicken in pink hot pants and white go-go boots. Yet despite a significant gang presence in the crowd, things never got out of hand. Thomas concluded his impromptu Soul Train audition by shepherding the dancers back to their seats. Hayes closed the show in full-on Black Moses mode, with gold chains draped across his bare chest. Some of the artists felt shortchanged later on; at one point thirteen of Stax’s lesser-known acts performed in the space of ninety minutes, and several scheduled performers couldn’t be squeezed in at all. But the day’s only other “crisis” turned out to be a temporary shortage of hot dogs.
Short term, Wattstax was a success. It raised more than $70,000 for the Watts community and spun off the documentary film, which pulled a respectable-at-the-time $1 million in revenue, and two sound track albums, the first of which went into the Top 30. Thanks to a little fudging afterward, the movie also gave the Staple Singers another hit, “Oh La De Da,” which wasn’t performed at the festival but does play under the opening scenes of the documentary. The track had actually been recorded at the Staples’ first Muscle Shoals session in 1970, and engineer Terry Manning later tacked on some audience noise and handclapping to suggest it was a live recording. Studio add-ons aside, it’s an ebullient gospel-soul performance, with piano and organ riding atop David Hood’s buoyant driving bass line. “If you feel like you wanna sing, come on, come on, come on,” Mavis exhorts.
Manning says Bell had been sitting on the track for more than two years because “we were saving it for a special place.” To create the audience-participation vibe, “I brought two classes of schoolkids into [Ardent studio], which had a huge hallway that goes all the way around in rectangular fashion with an outside garden in the middle. The kids wrapped around the garden, and their voices were blasting through these big PA speakers, so it sounded like ten times as many people were in there.” The single continued the Staples’ run of commercial successes, hitting number 4 on the R&B charts in early 1973.
But the long-term aftermath of Wattstax is murkier. Al Bell considers it his grandest achievement at Stax. “To be able to stand there and look up in those stands and see that many African Americans in a family spirit and family environment was amazing. We were able to demonstrate something to Americans who thought if two of us got together there would be a problem; yet here we were able to bring 112,000 of us together without any problems. To go through that day without any issues of that sort, that was the moment of my life.”
Yet the lack of major media coverage relegated Wattstax to a lesser place in the history of music festivals, despite its massive scale and the appearance of two of soul music’s biggest acts in Hayes and the Staple Singers. Bell was never able to get his film division off the ground, and the movie fell out of circulation for a couple of decades, before finally being resurrected on DVD in 2004. The media indifference ensured that troubled inner-city communities like Watts would remain in the shadows until they once again exploded in anger and frustration, as they did in 1992 in the wake of the court decision to exonerate the police officers who assaulted Rodney King. The same streets that hosted Wattstax at the Los Angeles Coliseum were twenty years later soaked in blood and violence. Sadly, the wry remarks of Richard Pryor in the Wattstax movie still rang true: “They accidentally shoot more [blacks] out here than anyplace in the world.”