Flush with the sweet feelings of success and the Atlantic advance money, Jim, Estelle, and Chips quickly recorded and released two more 45s. The first was Charles Heinz’s solitary followup to his previous year’s local hit, “Prove Your Love.” Issued in September 1960, “Suddenly” b/w “Nobody Cares” simply didn’t have the necessary legs, and Heinz gradually receded into local legend.1 Satellite’s very next release, Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes),” broke things wide open for the fledgling company.
Born December 21, 1942, into the musically inclined Thomas family, Carla was the middle of three children, all of whom went on to enjoy careers in music.2 Along with many of her contemporaries from the first period at Stax, Carla was part of the last generation of black Americans to come of age in the era of segregation. That, of course, had many ramifications, most of them decidedly negative. One of the ironies, though, of such an ugly system was the consequent quality of black schoolteachers and the black school system. Denied access to most high-paying, professional jobs, many of the most gifted minds in the black community became teachers. Respected and venerated, many of these educators had inordinately large influences within their community.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there were seven black high schools in Memphis: Booker T. Washington, Hamilton, Manassas, Douglas, Melrose, Carver, and Lester. The first three were located relatively close to Stax in South Memphis, and consequently the majority of Memphians who found their way into the Stax family were graduates of those schools. Booker T. Washington, in particular, produced an unbelievable amount of talent, including Rufus Thomas, Booker T. Jones, William Bell, David Porter, Gilbert Caple, Maurice White, the Bar-Kays, Andrew Love, the Mad Lads, Homer Banks, J. Blackfoot, and Carl Hampton. The majority of these musicians never fail to mention their high-school music teachers when discussing the development of their skills. In a community where the money for an instrument and/or private lessons was usually out of the question, the skill, drive, encouragement, and largesse of a music teacher could, and often did, make all the difference.
Carla was no exception. A student at Hamilton High School, she received exceptional training in gospel and opera, learning arias from classical works such as Il Trovatore in the process. Carla also benefited from being a member of WDIA announcer A. C. Williams’s Teen-Town Singers. Williams had started the Teen-Town Singers while still a biology teacher at Manassas High School. When hired by WDIA, at the recommendation of Nat D. Williams (no relation) in 1949, A. C. expanded the Teen-Town concept to include “the best talent from [all] the local high schools.” Carla was selected to be a Teen-Towner in 1952 at age ten. Still in grade school, she was four years younger than the specified Teen-Town minimum age.
Being a Teen-Town Singer meant rehearsals every Wednesday and Friday after school at the Abe Scharff branch of the YMCA at Linden and Lauderdale. Each week the choir prepared for a thirty-minute performance at 10 A.M. on Saturday on WDIA. The choir sang blues, gospel, jazz, and pop, and whenever WDIA was promoting a concert, the Teen-Towners would learn all the headlining artists’ material and feature it on their Saturday morning shows for three or four weeks in anticipation of the concert. The Teen-Towners also provided backup vocals for all the national artists who performed at WDIA’s annual Starlight and Goodwill charity revue programs.3
Every year a female and male Teen-Towner were selected out of the main choir and designated that year’s “pop” singers. These teenagers were deemed able to handle the most difficult pieces in the repertoire and, in effect, were the stars of the ensemble. One year the female “pop” singer was Barbara Griffin, the future wife of MG’s drummer Al Jackson. The next year it was Carla. It was as the “pop” singer of the year that Carla first sang two songs that she later recorded at Stax and issued on Atlantic, “The Masquerade Is Over” and the A. C. Williams composition “All I Want for Christmas.” Both had been earlier features for Barbara Jackson.4
Mandatory retirement for a Teen-Towner was effectively age eighteen, which meant Carla had literally stepped down from the group just weeks before her father walked through the front door of Satellite Records. As much as Carla learned in school and with the Teen-Towners, being Rufus Thomas’s daughter did not hurt when it came to becoming musically educated in the panorama of American vernacular music. As a youngster in the Foote Homes Housing Project, Carla remembers her father teaching all the neighborhood kids the hambone and hand jive, reciting nursery rhymes in proto-rap rhythms, and doing a little tap dancing. At the same time, Carla’s mother, Lorene, loved both country and western and Perry Como. The whole family listened to Red Foley’s “Breakfast Club” radio show in the morning, and Saturday night’s broadcast of the “Grand Ole Opry” was simply not to be missed. Carla and her brother Marvell both became expert at singing Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” and yodeling in harmony à la Eddy Arnold.5 Carla also adored Elvis Presley. “We loved Elvis Presley,” exclaims the dean of Stax artists. “We made a big deal over Elvis in the house. We’d be imitating him.”
Between her mother’s tastes and her own inclinations, Carla was a fair sight more pop-oriented than her rhythm-and-blues-shouting father. That partially explains the thirty-two-bar AABA Tin Pan Alley pop structure and idealized-in-the-extreme love lyric of “Gee Whiz.” At the time that she wrote it, Carla was only sixteen years old, and her main modes of expression were writing short stories and poems. “Gee Whiz” was an exception in that it truly was written as a song. Carla thinks that the inspiration probably stemmed from her brother Marvell who, forever seated at the family piano, would occasionally show his younger sister a few chords. The Thomases owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, so Rufus and Carla had the relative luxury of putting their creations down on tape, performing both on their own and together. Unbeknownst to Carla, shortly after she had committed “Gee Whiz” to tape in the fall of 1958, her father had decided to try and market the song.
Every Christmas season Rufus would visit a former Memphis tap-dancing friend, James Gary, in Chicago. This had become a ritual that Rufus describes as his then-annual Christmas present to himself. During the Christmas 1958 visit, Rufus took time out to head down to the office of one of the leading black independents of the day, Chicago’s VeeJay Records, to drop off Carla’s tape. When he didn’t hear anything from VeeJay over the next twelve months, Rufus simply stopped by the Chicago company during his Christmas visit in 1959 and asked for the tape back. When Rufus first journeyed down to Satellite to meet with Jim Stewart in the summer of 1960, this was among the tapes he had tucked under his arm.
Hindsight is usually slightly better than twenty/twenty. According to Jim, “Even at the time I was putting out ‘Cause I Love You’ I had heard Carla sing and I knew that [while] Rufus and Carla [were] fine, the real artist was Carla. I had talked to Rufus about recording her right from the beginning as a solo artist. The first day she came into the studio she sat down at the piano and sang ‘Gee Whiz’ and it was that magic that we all talk about in the record business. When I heard it, I felt, This is it! This is the record.”
Despite having just recorded his first hit, “Cause I Love You,” in his own studio, Jim decided to cut “Gee Whiz” over at Hi’s Royal Recording Studio, just around the corner from Stax on Lauderdale. “Our studio still was having sound problems,” explains Jim. “I wasn’t happy with what I was getting. We didn’t have the equipment. Hi had already had some success with Charlie Rich and two or three other artists and they were a factor in the local record business. So I hired the musicians and went over to the Hi studios and cut the record.”
Chips Moman hastens to add that as “Gee Whiz” was recorded with strings, it was the first Satellite session where Jim had to pay the musicians union scale. This was a major factor in Jim’s decision to use the Hi studio. With the basic cost of cutting the song going way beyond anything he had ever attempted before, he wanted the session to run as smoothly and quickly as possible.6 Because—in Chips’s words—the Satellite studio had barely been “turned on,” Jim felt that using the tried-and-true Hi studio was the safer route. Ostensibly a reasonable concept, it didn’t work. Finished tape in hand, Stewart spent a couple of days pondering the results before deciding this version of “Gee Whiz” was too fast and needed to be recut at McLemore.7 “I hated it,” demurs Moman. “It just didn’t sound good. We didn’t like the sound we got out of that studio.”
This time Stewart was intent on going whole hog, hiring Bob Talley to write a string arrangement to dress up what Stewart was betting would finally be his meal ticket. The strings Jim hired were a trio led by the Memphis Symphony’s first violinist, Noel Gilbert, whom Jim had studied under. At his best Jim can be a nervous sort. The “Gee Whiz” session nearly sent him to an early grave. Recording was scheduled for two o’clock on a hot, sticky August afternoon. A couple of minutes before two, the string players arrived, began to tune up, and then the clock started running. The only problem was that Bob Talley was nowhere to be found. When he still hadn’t arrived by 2:30, Stewart got on the phone, but there was no answer at Talley’s house. Hopping into his car, he drove like a fiend to Talley’s place, banged on the door, and woke the pianist up. When Talley finally stumbled to the door he explained that he had worked a gig the night before that hadn’t finished until the early morning hours. The long and short of it was he had completely forgotten to write the arrangement.
Carla Thomas and Jim Stewart circa “Gee Whiz.” COURTESY FANTASY, INC.
“I was going out of my skull,” relates Stewart. “I drove as fast as I could back to the studio. This must have been three o’clock. I got my fiddle out and said to Noel, ‘Here’s the basics. Just play doughnuts [whole notes].’ And I showed him the real simple string lines. I got to the bridge and I said, ‘Something needs to happen. Noel, when you get to the bridge, doodle by yourself.’” By the time recording actually began, the original session was already past its allotted three hours, and the string players were making union scale plus overtime. “I wound up paying them fifty dollars [for the regular session] and eighty-six dollars in overtime,” Jim recalls, laughing. “But somebody was looking out for me because when we hit that first take, it was magic.”
As was the case with virtually everything recorded at Stax through late 1967, the session was done “live.” While Carla sang the finished vocal, the strings, rhythm section, and background vocals simultaneously performed their parts. The latter were courtesy of the Veltones, all of whom were sharing Carla’s microphone, because, between the bass, drums, piano, and three violins, Jim had only one microphone input to spare on the company’s Ampex recorder.8
Shortly after the recording session, Carla moved to Nashville to attend Tennessee A & I. Her tuition had been paid for via a Teen-Town scholarship. With “Gee Whiz” released toward the end of her first term in November 1960 as Satellite 104, before her freshman year was out, Carla Thomas was a national star.
The record was not an instant smash, but Jim had faith. “I’ll tell you one thing,” emphasizes Chips, “Ain’t nobody in the world ever believed in a record as much as Jim did [in ‘Gee Whiz’]. He wouldn’t give up on that record. Carla was his real pet. That was who he believed in more than anybody.” It would take three months before the record made its debut appearance in Billboard. Eventually, though, the 45 peaked at number 5 on the rhythm-and-blues charts and number 10 on the pop charts, selling, according to Stewart, about 500,000 copies. As the single slowly began to make its initial impression in Memphis, Carla’s first performance as a solo artist was scheduled for the December 1960 WDIA Goodwill Revue. Four months earlier she had been a Teen-Town Singer, helping to provide background for such an event; now she was one of the headliners on break from her freshman year in college.
As Carla geared up for the concert, Jim received a rather rude shock. By his own admission, at the time he was pretty naive when it came to contracts. Having signed the rights to Rufus and Carla over to Atlantic for a five-year period, Jim assumed that Carla Thomas by herself was a wholly separate matter—hence, the initial release of “Gee Whiz” on Satellite. Meanwhile, Atlantic co-owner Jerry Wexler, disappointed with the final sales figures of “Cause I Love You,” was so busy with the usual day-to-day matters of running Atlantic in New York that he wasn’t even aware of the record’s existence. “When ‘Gee Whiz’ came out,” laughs Wexler, “I didn’t even know that we owned it. Neither did Jim. Of all people, Hy Weiss [owner of Old Town Records] called me and in his usual blustery, pseudo-tough guy role said, ‘Hey motherfucker, you got a record down here, but ’cause it’s you, I ain’t gonna interfere with it.’ He was telling me that I owned the record, and that he was doing me a favor by laying off. I got the message. Sure enough it checked out, and we had the rights.”
Hy Weiss owned Old Town Records but made his mortgage payments through a job with Jerry Blaine’s Cosnat Distributing, which just happened to distribute Atlantic Records. That December Weiss was in Chicago promoting an Old Town blues release by Bob Gaddy called “Operator.” While Weiss was visiting Leonard Chess, a truck pulled up to Chess Records unloading singles pressed in Memphis by Buster Williams’s Plastic Products. Weiss was operating on a shoestring and suggested to the driver that if he would let him ride down to Memphis, Hy would do his share of the driving. On the trip down South, Hy heard “Gee Whiz” on the radio. Convinced that it was a hit record, upon checking into the Chisca Hotel in Memphis, he called up Jim Stewart.
“I said, ‘Jim, I’d like to distribute your label and I can do a helluva job.’ He says to me, ‘Okay, we’ll sit down, we’ll make a deal.’ I said, ‘Let me look at your papers.’ I looked at the papers and realized Atlantic had an option. I called Jerry [Wexler] at home in Great Neck. I said, ‘Jerry, my friend, did you ever hear of a record called “Gee Whiz”?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Jerry, this is a fucking smash record. I think you oughta make a deal [i.e., exercise your option] with these guys but quick.’ Any other label but Chess or Atlantic and I would have grabbed that thing and they never would have seen the light of day. I liked everybody at Atlantic and I made a living through them [via his job at Cosnat Distributing]. Anyone who helped me, I never forgot.”
The next day Jim received a call from Wexler. He said, “Hey man, I hear my record’s doing good,” and “Gee Whiz” was immediately transferred to Atlantic 2086. In an odd coincidence, just as Carla’s record began its inexorable climb up the charts, a California pop trio called the Innocents released a different song that was also titled “Gee Whiz.” Hence Carla’s addition of “(Look at His Eyes)” to the title of her song. Satellite/Atlantic ads in the trades stressed that Carla’s paean to teen love should not be confused with the other record. They needn’t have worried, as the Innocents’ disc died a quick and quiet death.
As “Gee Whiz” broke into the top ten of both charts, Jerry Wexler decided to pay a visit to Memphis. While in town he wished to take Jim, Rufus, Carla, and Carla’s mother to dinner. Given the reality and attitude about racial segregation at that time in the mid-South, Jerry thought it best if they ordered room service and dined in his room. Thinking this through in advance, he had taken a suite rather than a regular room at Memphis’s most luxurious hotel, the Peabody. However, in Memphis at that time, blacks were not even allowed into the lobby of a hotel like the Peabody. “Rather than using the front door,” recalls Wexler, “we wound up going into the service entrance into the back of the hotel in an alley lined with garbage cans. It was humiliating and embarrassing to me and even more so to Rufus and the family. I remember on the way up Rufus said, ‘Same old story, back walking through the garbage.’”
Once safely ensconced in Wexler’s suite, everyone had a wonderful dinner, talked about Carla’s and, to a lesser extent, Rufus’s career, and then the Thomas family and Jim headed back to their respective homes. A little while later Wexler went to bed, having nearly forgotten about the earlier unpleasantness.
As Wexler tells the story, his encounter with the racial bugaboo of early sixties Memphis was not quite over. “Some time in the middle of the night, long after they were gone, comes this furious knocking at my door—‘MEMPHIS POLICE—VICE SQUAD—OPEN UP!’ Of course, I didn’t open up. I said, ‘What’s your problem?’ They said, ‘You got a woman in there.’ Well, suppose I did. That’s what hotels are for I would presume. Apparently, there had been some misconstruction [sic] about my guest list for the evening. The word miscegenation was still in the public vocabulary in the South in those days. The inference was I was entertaining a black female in my room, most probably a professional.”
Well aware of stories of disappearing civil rights workers and the like, before Wexler would let them in, he insisted that the hotel manager be summoned. In the meantime, he wrote a quick note to his partner in New York, Ahmet Ertegun. When the Memphis police, with the hotel manager in tow, escorted Wexler down to the lobby, he quickly dropped the note in the hotel’s mail box. “Maybe I was being super paranoid,” Wexler says with a shrug. “But I had notions of winding up in the trunk of a car and being dumped someplace in Mississippi or Arkansas.”
These types of ugly realities were not lost on anyone at Stax. According to most Stax personnel, white Memphis tended to be blissfully unaware of their existence until the ascendancy to superstardom of Isaac Hayes in the late sixties and early seventies. When there was some acknowledgment of the goings on at 926 E. McLemore, most would agree with artist, songwriter, and eventual head of publicity Deanie Parker that it tended to be negative.
“I think that most of them thought that we were a bunch of freaks, just into all kind of perverted action and what have you because there were blacks and whites together. ‘Oh, you know what they’re doing over there. Why else would they be over there?’” Parker says. Musicians, songwriters, office staff, and owners alike were forced to negotiate such racial absurdities on a day-to-day basis when they interacted with Memphis society at large. In many respects the company functioned as a world completely removed from the vicissitudes of the society in which it resided. Although there was no forethought to any of it, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton’s steadily growing mom-and-pop operation provided a case study of how black and white could intersect and interact. And although it might seem disingenuous, I believe Estelle when she asserts, “We never saw color, we saw talent. That was what was so great about being over there.”
Such a stance in the Memphis of the early 1960s was ipso facto political, irrespective of whether or not it was intended as such. In the case of Satellite, everything from the word go was accidental. If Jim and Estelle had found another empty movie theater available at the right price in a different neighborhood, maybe the emphasis would have remained on the pop and country product with which they began. Certainly the inventory and clientele of the Satellite Record Shop would have been substantially different, which, in turn, would probably have meant that the likes of Booker T. Jones, Gilbert Caple, Bob Talley, and David Porter wouldn’t have been hanging out there. Given how important the shop was as a conduit for Jim and Estelle to make connections with singers, instrumentalists, and songwriters, I believe that the grand accident that was Stax simply wouldn’t have happened.
Once it was established in what was fast becoming a ghetto, the process by which the company became integrated is fascinating. Aside from the string players on “Gee Whiz,” the musicians on the Carla and Rufus recording and Carla’s solo outing had been all black. Similarly, the session musicians were all black on the company’s next R&B release by the Chips, January 1961’s “You Make Me Feel So Good” b/w “As You Can See” (Satellite 105), but they were all white on Jimmy and the Spartans’ April 1961 bid for immortality, the execrable Milquetoast pop confection “You’re My Girl” b/w “Why Doesn’t She Notice Me” (Satellite 106). All of this changed dramatically with Satellite 107, “Last Night” by the Mar-Keys. Perhaps not so coincidentally, this was also the record on which what became known as the Stax sound began to crystallize.
The Mar-Keys’ history is both long and byzantine. The genesis of the group centers around guitarist Steve Cropper. Born in 1941 and raised on a little farm just outside Dora, Missouri (population c. 200), Cropper arrived in Memphis just shy of his tenth birthday after his dad was recruited to be a special agent on the railroad. While growing up in Dora, Steve heard lots of the “Grand Ole Opry” and little else. It was in Memphis that he would first hear black gospel music and fall in love with the rock and roll and rhythm and blues of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley. “When I came to Memphis and finally had my own radio, I used to listen to WDIA and at midnight they would play gospel music. That really turned me around. I mean I grew up in the church and heard a lot of a cappella music and stuff but I had never really heard black gospel and it just blew me away. This was when I was in probably about the sixth grade.”
His first guitar, an eighteen-dollar flat-top acoustic sunburst, was ordered from the Sears catalogue when he was fourteen years old. Pretty soon the budding musician hooked up with a fellow student at Messick High School, Charlie Freeman. By this point, Freeman had been playing guitar for a while and was studying with local jazz luminary Lynn Vernon. Steve managed to horn in on the lessons. “I would meet Charlie over at his house after he would get back from his guitar lessons and he would teach me [what he had just learned]. I don’t know if he looked at the fact that I was getting something for nothing, but I think he enjoyed having a buddy to play with.” Cropper eventually spent about three months taking lessons from Vernon directly, but he got bored pretty quickly, having little interest in learning how to read music.
In the meantime, Cropper and Freeman continued jamming together, slowly mastering the odd Elvis Presley tune such as “(Won’t You Be My) Teddy Bear.” Eventually a friend talked them into going down to disc jockey Keith Sherriff’s show on WHHM to show off their wares. That same friend had already pulled Sherriff’s coat to the fact that the two kids could play. In a story very reminiscent of Elvis Presley’s first interview, Sherriff put them in a room and said he wanted to see what they could do. Unbeknownst to either of them, the disc jockey had opened the microphone and put them on air. Audience response was immediate and positive, and Sherriff offered to let them play his sock hops if they got a drummer. Coincidentally, it was in this same time period that Jim Stewart was attempting to record and release the Fred Byler record.
It took a while for a suitable drummer to be found, but eventually Messick High student Terry Johnson was tabbed to fill the bill. Shortly after the newly constituted three-some played their first sock hop, Donald “Duck” Dunn entered the picture. Duck lived at the end of Cropper’s block, and he and Steve had grown up together, riding bicycles and playing baseball and football. They both also had shared interests in music and dancing, Duck being good enough in the latter department that he won several dance contests. Duck had already tried to emulate Steve’s passion for guitar playing, but somehow found the six strings just a little too much to master. Never one to give up easily, he went out and got a Kay bass. With the addition of Duck, the neophyte quartet spent the summer of 1957 playing a lot of CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) gigs, church functions, and the occasional dance at a place called the Casino.
“The better we got,” relates Steve, “the more money we made and the more guys we added to the group. We played a lot of private parties, we played a lot of proms. By the time we graduated in 1959, we were a pretty well-known group around town.” Eventually the original quartet was expanded to include Jerry “Smoochy” Smith on keyboards, former Regent Ronnie Angel as featured singer, and a horn section comprised of tenor saxophonist Charles “Packy” Axton, baritone saxophonist Don Nix, and trumpeter Wayne Jackson. All but Smith, Jackson, and Angel had been students at Messick High.
According to Steve, the addition of horns was purely a matter of pragmatism. Packy Axton’s mother, Estelle, and uncle, Jim, owned a recording studio and record label. “That’s definitely why Packy was in the band. He came up one day out of nowhere at school and says, ‘Hey, I hear you guys got a hot group.’ I said, ‘Well, we hadn’t thought about adding any horns to the group. How long have you been playing?’ He says, ‘I don’t know, about three or four weeks.’ He was honking and squeaking. ‘But my mother and my uncle own a recording studio.’ ‘Oh, that’s different. You’re in the band, I don’t care how well you play. See you Saturday’ As best as I can remember, that’s as true as it gets, with all due respect to Charles ‘Packy’ Axton. He turned out to be a great tenor player.”
Packy has become somewhat legendary within white Memphis. “Wasn’t anybody wilder than Packy,” asserts Wayne Jackson. “He was as hip as they came.” A rebel and an outsider from the start, Packy Axton is described by many as the “blackest white man” they have ever known. “Packy hung out with blacks when it wasn’t cool,” continues Jackson matter-of-factly. “Packy had a black roommate and he went with black chicks. But Packy wasn’t doing it out of love. He was doing it because he was rejecting the white race [with] his fucked-up James Dean attitude. He would do anything to embarrass his mother or his father, as in go out with black people, hang out with black people, stay with black people all the time.”
Although Packy may have taken that particular fantasy further than any of the others, in Cropper’s circle everyone was infatuated with the black rhythm and blues of groups like the Five Royales, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, and Bill Doggett. Lowman Pauling, the guitarist and songwriter with the Five Royales, in particular had an enormous influence on what became the sound of Stax. “Lowman was just phenomenal to me,” sighs Cropper. “I had already been listening to the records and [then] the Five Royales came to Memphis and did a performance out at the Beverly Ballroom. I got to see them play and I couldn’t believe this guy. He had his guitar way below Chuck Berry’s, he had it down damn near below his knees, almost to his ankles. It almost dragged the floor. It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen! He had to play all the funky licks down in the first fret area because there was no way he could reach [any higher]. But, when it came time to take a solo up high, he would pick the guitar up and, of course, the strap would just kind of fall loose and he would hold it and play his high stuff and then he’d drop it back down and go into his rhythm. It just fascinated me. He played between the legs and behind the head. This was the first guy I ever saw do that. He just danced with the guitar. He was all over the place. He was real influential.
“A lot of guitar players play more like piano players. They play the whole picture all the way. Then they’d throw in a riff here and there. Lowman mainly just noodled rhythm and then, when there was a hole, man he’d just come out loud and just give you this big slingshot. I think that really influenced me. I think that’s probably what developed my style in doing sessions: listening for holes in the singer so the licks I play are as important to the melody as the melody is to the licks I play, where one flows into the other rather than me sitting there trying to play guitar and stepping all over the singer.”
When a group like the Five Royales would play Memphis, more than likely the Veltones would open up. If the gig was at a white all-ages establishment such as the Beverly Ballroom or Clearpool, it was easy for white teenagers to go see them. Three of the hippest rhythm-and-blues clubs, though, were located just across the Mississippi River in West Memphis. Of these, the Plantation Inn was the most popular. According to Jim Dickinson, actually getting into the PI was not always possible or plausible for the younger white set but, fortunately, the club was built in such a fashion that the music could be heard quite clearly in the parking lot. It wasn’t uncommon for would-be hipster white teenagers to spend the evening lying down inside a car grooving to the sounds pumping out non-stop from the club.
Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper appeared to have had an easier time of it. “There seemed to be no age limit,” laughs Duck, “ ’cause Steve and I really looked young. Even when we were fifteen, we looked twelve, and they didn’t care. I guess they were paying the law off. We never asked any questions, we just got in.” Steve picks up the conversation: “Just walked up and said we wanted to go in. All you had to do was pay your two bucks at the door. We’d all take in a little bottle of sloe gin or whatever it was and sip it with Coke, but the main interest was the music. A lot of people would go there and dance. We’d just go over there and listen to the music.”
The Memphis clubs were a little stricter. “On this side of the bridge,” continues Steve, “we weren’t allowed to get in the clubs. But guys like Clifford Curry [owner of Curry’s Club Tropicana] knew we were serious about it. We were there to hear the music and were just really enthralled by the whole deal. He would let us stand right there at the door. At the Handy Club behind the bandstand there was a big mirror where you could see the band’s reflection. [Owner Sunbeam Mitchell] would tell us, ‘If you see the cops, you guys get outta here ’cause it will get me in trouble.’ He couldn’t let us come in and we couldn’t have a beer but we did get to hear the music. That’s where I got to see Ben Branch and people like that.” A lot of the local black bands such as Willie Mitchell’s and Ben Branch’s also played Catholic Youth Organization dances on Sunday, providing yet one more avenue for budding musicians such as Cropper and Dunn to soak up the hard-hitting sounds of Memphis rhythm and blues.
WHBQ deejay Dewey Phillips also had an inordinate influence on every white kid who was even the least bit interested in black music in Memphis in the mid- and late 1950s. Phillips was a renegade in every sense of the word, talking trash faster and blacker than his birthright should have allowed for, while spinning some of the hippest records ever cut. “Duck and I kinda grew up on Dewey Phillips’ ‘Red Hot and Blue’ show,” affirms Steve. “He played a lot of R-and-B records. We were highly influenced by that.”
At some point, Cropper, Freeman, and the rest of the group began playing under the moniker the Royal Spades. In 1959 the Royal Spades (minus Wayne Jackson and keyboard player Smoochy Smith, who had yet to join) landed a residency at Neil’s Hideaway out by the Millington Naval Base on Thomas Street where for nine months they ground out the toughest black rhythm and blues and rock and roll that a white band from Memphis could possibly muster.9 The Royal Spades spent their Sundays journeying out to Brunswick, rehearsing and trying to cut something that was good enough to be released on Satellite. According to Cropper, Jim Stewart tolerated them only because of the fact that Packy was Estelle’s son, but ultimately he did not seem to have much faith in their abilities. “Jim Stewart said, ‘These guys will never make it.’ I think he really thought we were just horrible. It was his sister’s son’s group so to speak and he let us get by with it somehow.”
Shortly after Jim and Estelle moved out of Brunswick, Wayne Jackson was inaugurated as a Royal Spade. Terry Johnson and Duck Dunn had discovered Jackson while the trumpeter was doing a little work with Charles Heinz. When the two Spades dropped by a Heinz rehearsal they were knocked out by what they heard and quite quickly made Jackson an offer to join the Royal Spades that he couldn’t refuse. While their efforts in the studio kept coming up empty, on stage, replete with their gray coats with black felt spade on the pocket, they were dynamos. According to Jim Dickinson, baritone saxophonist Don Nix and Wayne Jackson were the visual ones. “They had a Mutt and Jeff comedy routine that was as funny as anything you’ve ever seen white people do. Wayne was hysterical.”
The Last Night album is a fair indication of the range of their material in this period. While the Spades may have been infatuated with the sounds of black rhythm and blues, they were also able to play convincing versions of jazz classics such as “Night in Tunisia” and “One O’clock Jump” as well as lighter, pop-oriented affaire. “We had to play a lot of those military gigs,” explains Cropper, “and these old colonels would come in and they’ve got their wives. They want ‘Cherry Pink Apple Blossom White.’ They want ‘Stardust,’ ‘Misty’ ‘Moonlight in Vermont.’ We had to learn to play all those things or we didn’t get paid. Then we got to play our Ray Charles [numbers].”
The group also managed to come up with a handful of originals, including one sort of half-jazz, half-funky instrumental with the memorable title “Bouncing Off the Wall.” It was usually the originals that they worked on when they could get studio time, because cutting a record was still their focus. Although the Royal Spades had not been successful in getting a 45 released while Satellite was out in Brunswick, they had not given up. In the spring of 1961, they finally got their first chance to record at McLemore. As Jim Stewart had little faith in the group, Chips Moman was in charge of the session.
By this point, the band had been reduced to a single guitarist because Charlie Freeman had left to go on tour with the Joe Lee Orchestra. It was while playing a gig with Joe Lee in Chicago that Freeman first heard his former group’s debut record, “Last Night,” on the radio. On Estelle’s recommendation, the Royal Spades changed their name. Don Nix had originally suggested the “Marquis” in the grand tradition of group monikers such as the Counts, the Viscounts, etc. Cropper pointed out that “People around here don’t read French,” so someone else suggested that they could create a pun on the keys of a piano if they modified the spelling to Mar-Keys.10
The genesis of “Last Night” came about when Chips Moman and a country keyboard player named Jerry “Smoochy” Smith were fooling around at the piano during a break at a gig they were playing together at the Hi-Hat Club. Intoxicated with a little riff they had stumbled upon, according to Chips they began trying to work it up into a song at Satellite the very next day. Steve Cropper recalls that he and Packy suggested the horn blasts on beat one and its following offbeat. “It was a group effort,” asserts Wayne Jackson. “A lot of people claim this and claim that but the truth is it was a spontaneous effort by all of us. It went on for days after we finally worked out what it was gonna be like. We cut that record for a week, day in and day out until we finally got a piece of tape that was from front to back okay.”
There is quite a bit of dissension as to how the riff was eventually transformed into the record “Last Night” by the Mar-Keys. Chips, Smoochy, and baritone saxophonist Floyd Newman claim that when the song was cut it wasn’t even conceived of as a Mar-Keys session. Naturally most of the Mar-Keys vehemently disagree.11 Chips says the recording was completed in a day; Steve says that a day or two was spent working it up and then one day was spent cutting it; Smoochy says it took a month to nail the song; Terry Johnson says two to three weeks; Duck Dunn says three weeks; and Wayne Jackson says it was attempted on several days with slightly different feels and tempos.12
The road version of the Mar-Keys: (left to right) Don Nix, Steve Cropper, Packy Axton, Duck Dunn, Terry Johnson, Ronnie Angel (a.k.a. Stoots), Wayne Jackson, COURTESY DEANIE PARKER.
Probably there were several different attempts made at recording the song on several different days. This is partially supported by the fact that several people remember working on the song at different times with different drummers. Mar-Keys drummer Terry Johnson, who was a year younger than the rest of the band and consequently still finishing high school, recalls coming down to the studio one day after school got out. When Terry walked in he encountered Smoochy, Chips, and some of the members of the band already working on the song. This was probably the first day that Smoochy and Chips brought the riff in. Terry claims he played drums on several early attempts at the song, eventually giving way to black session musician Curtis Green. Duck Dunn also insists that he played on several early versions of the song before he, unfortunately, missed the day the master was cut while out fishing with his dad in Mississippi.
Johnson’s and Dunn’s accounts jibe with black tenor saxophonist Gilbert Caple’s memory; Caple was the one who suggested replacing Johnson on the record with Curtis Green, and it was Caple who brought bassist Lewie13 Steinberg in to sub for the AWOL Dunn. Caple lived about three blocks from the studio on McLemore Street. A decade older than the members of the Mar-Keys, he was already making his living teaching high-school band in West Memphis. Curtis Green had been a student of his who also was playing at the Plantation Inn. Caple had originally come by Stax on the suggestion of David Porter, who worked across the street from the studio at Jones’ Big D Grocery and knew Caple on a casual basis due to their mutual interest in music. Porter, in partnership with Isaac Hayes, a few years later would become one of the most important songwriters in soul music. In early 1961, he was still attempting to get in the door.
Cropper remembers seeing Curtis Green play at the Plantation Inn a number of times. “He used to play with his hands,” smiles the lanky guitarist, “and play all these kind of Latin-African kind of percussion things. I’d seen him play a dozen times with the Veltones. I said, ‘You’re always making these big turns with the toms.’ That wound up being the intro to ‘Last Night.’”
“No one at Stax really believed in the band [as far] as being real professional musicians,” relates Steve, “but they really liked the song ‘Last Night.’ The funny thing was we were probably the hottest band in Memphis, Tennessee. Every school wanted us for their proms and every club was trying to hire us to be a regular band.” Chips Moman was one of those who didn’t really believe in the band, which partially explains why the finished record included only Packy Axton and Wayne Jackson from the Mar-Keys. The rest of the group on the actual record was Smoochy Smith (who immediately became a member of the Mar-Keys), Curtis Green, Gilbert Caple, baritone saxophonist Floyd Newman, and bassist Lewie Steinberg. Much to Steve Cropper’s chagrin, Moman also decided that “Last Night” didn’t need a guitar and hence he does not appear on the record.14
As was the case with most of the black session musicians, Floyd Newman had come into Stax by way of the Satellite Record Shop. A native Memphian, Newman had long been an accomplished musician working the road with a Sam Cooke package tour that included Johnnie Taylor, Jerry Butler, and Dee Clark while he was still in college. He had also done some studio work with Jackie Brenston. A couple of years prior to the “Last Night” sessions, Newman had relocated to Detroit. Back in Memphis for a few days to visit his parents, who lived just a block away from Stax on College, he ran into a number of musicians he knew hanging out at the record shop. One thing led to another and Newman soon found himself playing sessions at Satellite by night while teaching high-school band in Mississippi by day. It is Newman who provides the spoken “last night” interpolations on the actual record.
Also supporting the notion that the song was recorded over several different days is the fact that—according to Jerry Wexler, Smoochy Smith, Duck Dunn, and Estelle Axton—early versions of the song did not have the tenor sax solo featured on the released 45. Supposedly Wexler heard an early take and suggested that a sax solo be added.15 Chips Moman flatly denies this. In any event, when a solo was deemed necessary, Gilbert Caple was given the job. This was the first solo he had ever recorded and consequently Caple was somewhat scared. “We worked so long that night that everybody got disgusted,” sighs Caple. According to the saxophonist, the solo that is heard on the record was actually pieced together from several different attempts.
As convoluted as all this is, the net result was a popping twelve-bar blues-based instrumental. What is significant is that this relatively simple recording featured a racially integrated group sporting a hard-hitting drum sound, an emphasis on the low end of the pitch spectrum, organ (a Farfisa in this instance), and exceedingly prominent horns, all contributing to an enticing, swinging groove that was purely southern. All of these ingredients became essential to the sound of Memphis soul in the 1960s.
Released in June 1961 as Satellite 107 by the Mar-Keys, the record eventually hit number 2 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues charts and number 3 on the pop charts. According to Jim Stewart, it sold about one million copies. Ironically, neither Jim nor Chips Moman was all that enthralled with the recording; Jim in particular was unhappy with the fluctuations in tempo. If Estelle Axton’s son had not been part of the group, the odds are good it would never have come out.
“The boys had put down this little instrumental,” Estelle recalls, smiling. “Of course, Chips and my brother weren’t too interested because ‘Gee Whiz’ had taken off and they were doing an album on Carla. So they didn’t have time to worry about that instrumental. But, at that time instrumentais were doing pretty good because Bill Black had just come off a biggie with ‘Smokie’ [on Memphis’s Hi Records]. My brother had gone far enough to get a dub made from the tape of [‘Last Night’]. He took it down to radio station WLOK. The first time that thing was played, customers were coming in and asking for it. They were saying, ‘I don’t know what it is but in it, it says “last night.’” I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s our record and it’s only on tape.’ Of course, I didn’t tell the customer that. I wanted him to believe it was a record in the marketplace. The radio station began to get calls for it, ‘Play it again.’ This went on for three or four weeks. It was driving me nuts knowing that we had a hit back there and nothing was being done about it. It just upset me to no end.”
As this scenario unfolded, Jim and Chips were up in Nashville, recording Carla’s Gee Whiz album, with sessions scheduled around the college freshman’s classes. By the time they returned to Memphis, the demand for the record had grown significantly. “Each day more and more people were calling for it,” continued Estelle. “WLOK was just playing it and playing it and playing it. The more calls they got, the more they played it. Every time people would hear it, they’d be driving down the street and they’d stop and ask to get the record.”
One night Estelle had all she could take. When her husband Everett came to pick her up at the end of the day, she informed him he would have to wait as she had some business to take care of. She headed back into the studio, where she cornered Jim and Chips. At first she tried to reason with them. When that didn’t work, she turned on the tears, but that also was to no avail. Finally, she started swearing. “I don’t do that very often and my brother had never heard me say a bad word, but I said some ugly words. It shocked him. It shocked him into putting the record out. I was trying in every way I could to get this to happen. In the end I got what I wanted. He said, ‘I’ll bet you a hundred dollars, it won’t hit.’ Chips was sitting there so smug and he said, ‘I’ll take half of that.’ I want you to know they never paid off that debt!”
Once the go-ahead was given to release the record, to everyone’s horror it was discovered that the master tape was missing about sixteen bars off the front end. Apparently, the tape had been sent up to Nashville to be processed with what Smoochy Smith termed “German echo.” Unbeknownst to anyone at Satellite, the Nashville cats had accidentally erased part of the tape. As improbable as it seems, Chips, Jim, and Wayne Jackson all recall digging through the trash basket at the studio for “Last Night” outtakes. “The guys dug in the garbage can,” Wayne remembers, laughing, “and pulled out pieces of tape and played them until they found one that was really similar in feel and spliced them together!” Fortunately for Satellite, they were still so small that no one was designated to put out the trash on a regular basis. To this day Estelle insists she can still hear that splice.
Steve Cropper claims, “‘Last Night’ made it strictly for one reason: it was the first instrumental record that you could dance the twist to. It had that Hank Ballard twist beat. That’s exactly why it was so popular. It was absolute perfect timing. Everybody was twisting to that song.” In fact, Cropper remembers playing Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” television show in Philadelphia and watching the audience twist while the Mar-Keys mimed to the record.
Wayne Jackson points out another element that helped break the record. “The disc jockeys used to love that record. We left a hole in it with nothing. They got to say it [last night’]. It was a great gimmick.” One such disc jockey was Memphis’s Dewey Phillips, famed for being the first to play Elvis Presley on his “Red, Hot and Blue” show on Memphis station WHBQ. While WLOK may have broken the record for black Memphians, WHBQ did the honors for the white populace. Jackson claims, “Phillips made ‘Last Night’ happen. He played that record over and over. We sold three thousand records in Memphis, which was total saturation of the market. On the two-bar break Dewey could be heard hollering ‘Open your Budweiser and pour it in. Freeze it and eat it.’”
Memphis had already established a bit of an instrumental tradition through Bill Justis’s “Raunchy” on Sun in 1957, the Bill Black Combo’s “Smokie” in 1960 on Hi, as well as with the repertoires of the leading local rhythm-and-blues bands of the time, such as those of Al Jackson, Sr., Ben Branch, and Willie Mitchell. “Last Night” was to be the first of a long line of hard-edged instrumental recordings by a number of Stax artists, including the Triumphs, the Barracudas, Sir Isaac and the Do-Dads, most significantly Booker T. and the MG’s, and eventually the Bar-Kays.
Although Jim and Estelle had already recorded two hits, “Last Night” was the first big hit to have its chart run on Satellite Records. “Gee Whiz” was successful on a national level on Atlantic and the less-successful “Cause I Love You’ had sold the majority of its copies on Atco. With such newfound national prominence for their name and logo, Jim and Estelle were to hear from a California organization that was already using the name Satellite Records.
“They wrote us and indicated that they’d be willing to sell the name to us for a lot of money,” Jim Stewart recalls, laughing. “I didn’t bother to respond. Satellite Records was always a name that I never really liked, but it was the only one we [could come up with] at the time.” Jim was more than happy to give up using “Satellite.” Luckily he and Estelle already had both a new name and logo in the works. They had originally conceived of “Stax” (the name was Jim’s wife’s idea: “St” from Stewart; “Ax” from Axton) as a subsidiary of Satellite. Now it became their main imprint, and “Last Night” was hastily reissued as the first record on the new label. To keep some continuity, its catalogue number, 107, was retained, meaning there were never records issued as Stax 100 through 106. The Mar-Keys’ lead singer, Ronnie Stoots (stage name Ronnie Angel), designed the now-famous Stax logo of a stack of dancing records.
The same month that “Last Night” was unleashed on an unsuspecting world, Rufus and Carla Thomas released their second duet, “I Didn’t Believe.” Oddly enough it was issued on Atco under the rather mysterious sobriquet “Rufus and Friend.” A pleasant enough blues, it failed to make any waves. It was at Jerry Wexler’s insistence that Carla appeared on Atlantic and Rufus on Atco. This irked Jim Stewart, who naturally wanted records by his two certified stars to be issued on his own labels. After “I Didn’t Believe,” a compromise was reached whereby Rufus’s subsequent recordings would appear on Stax whereas Carla’s would be released on Atlantic. This arrangement was to be maintained until the spring of 1965, when Atlantic and Stax finally negotiated a formal written contract. Beginning in May 1965 Carla Thomas’s releases would appear under the Stax imprimatur as well.
In the meantime, before the California-based Satellite Records became aware of Jim Stewart’s operation via the success of “Last Night,” four other records had appeared on Satellite by Prince Conley, Nick Charles, Hoyt Johnson, and Barbara Stephens. Charles was a prominent Memphis pop disc jockey. In the words of Wayne Jackson, his records were strictly “a matter of payola.” Johnson, whom Stewart had hooked up with through Erwin Ellis, was the last country artist Jim Stewart ever cut, while Prince Conley and Barbara Stephens both made records that continued Satellite’s R&B direction. Produced by Chips Moman, the Conley record, “I’m Going Home,” in particular, is a gem. Auspiciously, the Conley session was the first time Steve Cropper was hired as a session musician at Stax, while the Stephens’ 45, “The Life I Live,” features the songwriting debut at Stax of David Porter and Marvell Thomas.
1. The operatically trained Heinz was apparently somewhat reminiscent of teen idol Jimmy Clanton. According to Jim Dickinson, local iconoclast and leader of Mud Boy and the Neutrons, Heinz was a dynamite performer: “You can’t imagine how good he was. His hair was sculpted up in a pompadour so high, he would lean it over and flop it down!”
2. Marvell Thomas became an accomplished piano player, writer, and producer whose skills graced countless Stax sessions, while the youngest Thomas sibling, Vanese, sang backup on a number of Carla’s recordings and in the 1980s and 1990s did session work in New York, wrote songs for the likes of Freddie Jackson, and enjoyed a moderately successful solo career on Geffen Records.
3. Held in July and December each year, these revues featured R&B stars from all over the country. Each artist performed for expenses only, with all profits being deployed for charity work within Memphis’s black community.
4. Other Teen-Towners who eventually figured into the Stax story included future Mad Lads John Gary Williams and Julius Green, future Soul Children member Anita Louis, Betty Brown of Barbara and the Browns, O. B. McClinton, and Carla’s brother, Marvell. It was a sad day when WDIA chose to discontinue the program in the mid-1960s.
5. Marvell actually won a few local yodeling contests.
6. In 1997 Jim Stewart suggested that it is quite possible that the Hi version had no strings on it.
7. For the record it should be noted that Carla does not remember ever going over to Hi!
8. William Bell has always claimed that the Del-Rios sang background on “Gee Whiz,” while the Veltones and Jim Stewart have consistently insisted it was the Veltones.
9. They were not totally unique in tackling this musical style. For quite some time it had been a southern tradition for white frats to hire black bands to play their parties. Gradually a few white bands evolved that could play passable versions of this material themselves, the frats serving as their main outlets. Down in Jackson, Mississippi, Tim Whitsett and the Imperials were stomping down on such a black-imbued repertoire, as were the Del-Rays over in the Muscle Shoals/Florence/Sheffield area of Alabama. Members of both bands would figure in the Stax story in the 1970s.
10. Contrary to what has commonly been claimed, initially it was not a pun on Satellite’s theater marquee.
11. It should be noted that the B-side of the original 45, “Night Before,” was recorded by the actual Mar-Keys rhythm section—Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Terry Johnson—plus an integrated horn ensemble and copyrighted by Wayne Jackson, Duck Dunn, Terry Johnson, Steve Cropper, and Packy Axton.
12. Bass player Lewie Steinberg claims it was at one point attempted as a waltz!
13. Not Louis as has been commonly printed. This has been a matter that has irked Steinberg since day one.
14. It has been written that Cropper played organ on one part while Smith played piano. This is not borne out by listening to the record. In 1996, Cropper confirmed that this might have been on one of the earlier, unused takes.
15. Dunn thought that the song was originally recorded with just a rhythm section, and that Wexler had suggested that a horn section be added to the song.