City in the Sky, the second Staple Singers album from the fruitful 1972 Muscle Shoals sessions, finally rolled out in August 1974. It was once again a superior Al Bell production job, a canny merger of North and South: Stax soul nurtured at Muscle Shoals, and Motown-style production sweetness overdubbed in Michigan, with Terry Manning serving as jack-of-all-trades mixologist and multi-instrumentalist.
The album added yet more shades to the Staples’ musical vocabulary. The opener, O. B. McClinton’s “Back Road into Town,” had a pronounced country-soul feel, akin to the plainspoken storytelling of Clarence Carter’s “Patches.” In this instance, the notion of a struggling father pitted against “the man in the big house” spoke directly to the Staples’ own history: Pops’s formative years on a sharecroppers’ farm and the family’s sometimes life-threatening adventures on the Southern gospel circuit. The title song also reached outside the normal Stax songwriting circles. The husband-wife team of Charles Chalmers and Sandra Rhodes, with sister Donna Rhodes, cast urban reform as a matter of social and spiritual urgency. Mavis gives it an introspective reading, before an extended coda fired by keyboards, horns, and handclaps. “Washington We’re Watching” returns to the Homer Banks–Raymond Jackson–Carl Hampton triumvirate for a protest song shot through with funk, via Clayton Ivey’s organ fills, and rock guitar.
City in the Sky ranks among the most overtly gospel-oriented releases in the Staples’ Stax tenure, with the celebratory “There Is a God” and the lilting island rhythms of “My Main Man.” The last word belonged to Pops, who admonishes an upstart with the kind of gentle firmness he exuded in everyday life on Mack Rice’s “Getting Too Big for Your Britches,” embroidered by Eddie Hinton’s guitar leads.
The Staples added to their hit streak at Stax with City in the Sky going to number 4 and “My Main Man” peaking at number 18 on the R&B charts. But by the time “Who Made the Man” was released as a third single from the album in November, the Staples were severing their ties with the label.
Al Bell had earlier worked out a distribution deal with CBS, the most powerful record company in the world at the time, to distribute Stax product. But the deal came unraveled in the midst of a payola scandal that ousted CBS executive Clive Davis. Stax product languished in warehouses rather than reaching retail stores, and the label struggled to pay its bills. Checks bounced to Isaac Hayes, Little Milton, and Richard Pryor. Hayes sued and eventually departed the label, depriving Al Bell of his biggest star. The Staples were next, in large measure because Pops had serious doubts that Al Bell could fulfill his financial obligations after executing an option clause to retain the group’s services for another year.
On October 25, 1974—less than two weeks after Bell visited Chicago to solidify the deal with the Staples—Stax filed a $67 million antitrust suit against CBS. The same day, Bell received a mailgram from Pops requesting “a cancellation of our agreement.” Bell was stunned and made no effort to conceal that he was taking Pops’s rejection personally. When questioned about the Staples departure decades later, Bell says his recollections are clouded by the economic chaos that was only just beginning to descend on Stax and his business fortunes.
“I don’t remember how I felt,” he says after a long pause. “I was going through so much. I could’ve been a bit hurt. I felt, wow, with the Staples, irrespective of what was happening to me at the time, that I could come through it all. . . . I had a conversation with Pops alone about that. But I was fighting for my life at the time, and in the end Pops had to do what he felt was right for his family.”
Bell was accused of embezzling company funds, the federal government scoured the label’s books for evidence of payola, and the Internal Revenue Service investigated Stax for back taxes. On January 12, 1976, a U.S. bankruptcy judge would close Stax at the request of the label’s chief creditor, Union Planters National Bank. The bank claimed Stax owed it $8.8 million and had debts of more than $30 million. Bell was later cleared of all charges, but the catalog he had so tirelessly built was sold to Fantasy Records to help repay creditors.
Bell returned with his family to Little Rock to live in his father’s basement while he rebuilt his life. Eventually, he would return to the record business to work with Prince, run the Memphis Music Foundation, and win a Grammy Award.
Though he calls the final days of Stax “a near-death experience,” he justifiably looks back on the label’s musical legacy as a profound and lasting one. Despite the acrimonious parting with the Staple Singers, he still is moved to tears when speaking about the family.
“I saw music as it related to people, period,” he says. “It was part of the civil rights movement because of the time. That socio-economic group that African Americans were part of at that time, and today—the music was about our lives, our lifestyle, and our living. . . . I don’t think Pops planned it that way, but I heard it as far back as ‘Uncloudy Day.’ We were singing and living each other, the Staples and me. It’s the only act that I’ve ever been involved with that I had that kind of bond.”