All told, 1964 was a fairly quiet year at Stax. Although thirty-two 45s were issued by the company on Atlantic, Volt, and Stax, twelve of these were by the label’s proven artists: Rufus and Carla Thomas, Booker T. and the MG’s, and Otis Redding. Surprisingly, no one at the company was able to achieve anything remotely close to a substantial hit on the level of “Gee Whiz,” “Green Onions,” or “These Arms of Mine.” While the lack of a mega-hit obviously disappointed Stax’s brain trust, the company remained in relatively good health. With the exception of the MG’s, virtually every release by each of its main artists charted.1 The bottom line is that sales were steady but unspectacular, the majority of records being sold to a black clientele through inner-city America’s numerous mom-and-pop record outlets.
While Stax was struggling, its northern counterpart, Motown Records, was in its ascendancy, with the Supremes, Mary Wells, the Miracles, the Temptations, and Stevie Wonder all regularly tearing up the pop charts. The sign outside Motown proudly proclaimed the company “Hitsville U.S.A.” the marquee outside the Stax studio, on the other hand, was adorned with the words “Soulsville U.S.A.” These slogans perfectly sum up the diametrically opposed aesthetic and operating philosophies of the two companies.
Motown president Berry Gordy, Jr., was a product of the urban industrial North. Relentlessly driven, ruthlessly ambitious, and autocratic to the bone, Gordy ran his operation very much from a master plan. Utilizing sound business practices such as vertical integration, Gordy maximized both his control and ultimate profitability by operating a management company, booking agency, and record company under one roof. Jim Stewart, on the other hand, was a product of the rural, fraternal South. Although he wanted to make money, he could easily be content with what might seem to be a modicum of success, not caring a whit about making further profits via management or booking activities. In what has to be one of the great ironies of the Stax story, Stewart was always loudly championing keeping the company’s sound as “black” as possible. While various black writers and later co-owner Al Bell were interested in crossover success, Stewart seemingly wasn’t the least bit interested if crossing over meant compromising what he was gradually coming to understand as the “Stax sound.”
“We could never grab that little thing Motown had,” shrugs Stewart. “Of course, they couldn’t [grab] ours either. We envied them being able to cross over to the pop market back then when we couldn’t, but it just wasn’t us. When we tried to do something like that, we would fall flat on our butt. We had to do what we knew best.” In general, Stewart was much less authoritarian and much more egalitarian than Gordy. Within a few years, Stax would effectively engage in profit sharing, an unthinkable occurrence at Motown. Finally, Stewart certainly did not operate from a master blueprint; at Stax, things tended to occur by happenstance.
A key contributor to Stax’s secure financial position was Estelle Axton’s activities at the Satellite Record Shop. By now Lady A had developed into what Jim described as “the damnest salesman I ever saw.” Shortly after commencing operation, she had instituted a program whereby, with every ten records purchased, customers would get one free. This little gimmick allowed Estelle to keep a file card on each customer; she not only kept track of the number of records purchased, she also wrote down the titles. The minute a customer would ask for a record, Estelle would pull his or her card and at a glance could see what they had been buying.
“I could see what type of music he’d like,” Estelle chortles. “If I’d gotten any records since he’d [last] been in, I played everything that was in that vein and I got nineteen of his twenty dollars. Don’t ever let a customer show me twenty dollars ’cause I’ll get nineteen of it. I’ll leave him money to get home ’cause I’ll sell him more records [when he returns]. They wouldn’t go anywhere else to buy their records. They’d say, ‘If Satellite don’t have it, it’s not in town.’” Employee William Brown proudly asserts, “We got so good in that shop till you could hum the line and we could go get the record!”
If Estelle ran low on a popular record over the weekend, she would simply go across town to her major competition, Pop Tunes. She would then hit on an unwitting employee and buy, at a wholesale rate, Pop Tunes’ complete stock of the title. Of course, that would mean that Pop Tunes wouldn’t have the record anymore, and both their customers and Satellite’s would have to come over to East McLemore to get their sonic fix.
While sales of Stax and Volt product were less than spectacular in 1964, the company did issue a number of superb singles. One was an instrumental recorded and released under baritone saxophonist Floyd Newman’s name that slipped out of the gate just before the first of the year. According to Floyd his lone solo 45, “Frog Stomp” backed with “Sassy,” came about directly as a result of intensive lobbying by Estelle. As was the case with most of the Stax session musicians, Newman earned a substantial part of his living playing gigs in and around Memphis. When he got the opportunity to record his own record, he elected to use his own band, including Joe Woods on guitar, Howard Grimes on bass, and Isaac Hayes on piano. Hayes had cowritten “Frog Stomp” with Newman, although he was not credited when the original record came out.
The Newman session was not the first time that Isaac Hayes had headed down to Stax. A couple of years earlier he had auditioned for the company as part of a doo-wop ensemble that went by the name of the Ambassadors, and he had also auditioned as a member of the blues band Calvin and the Swing Cats. To his disappointment, both groups were turned down.
Hayes’s story is one of epic proportions. Beginning in 1969, with the release of Hot Buttered Soul, he would become the biggest artist Stax ever produced and one of the most important artists in the history of rhythm and blues. In the first few years of the 1970s he single-handedly redefined the sonic possibilities for black music, in the process opening up the album market as a commercially viable medium for black artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic, and Curtis Mayfield. Earlier, Hayes, alongside partner David Porter, helped shape the sound of soul music in the 1960s with such definitive compositions as “Hold On! I’m Comin’,” “Soul Man,” “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” “B-A-B-Y,” and “I Thank You.” The fact that one artist could be responsible for such disparate but equally great and influential music as Hayes produced in the 1960s and 1970s simply boggles the imagination.
Born August 20, 1942, in Covington, Tennessee, by the time Hayes was eighteen months old his mother had passed away in a mental institution; because his father had disappeared sometime before her death, Isaac was subsequently raised by his grandparents. To sharecroppers such as Hayes’s grandparents, radio was their major contact with the rest of the world. For the first several years of Isaac’s life this meant a steady diet of what was then called “hillbilly music,” with Saturday night’s “Grand Ole Opry” broadcast being of particular importance.2 Hayes’s musical imagination was also fired by the gospel music he heard on the radio performed by the Golden Gate Quartet (singing on the “Amos and Andy Show”) and the Wings Over Jordan Choir, and he fondly remembers touring gospel groups such as the Spirit of Memphis Quartet putting on programs at the local churches in Covington.
A pivotal moment in Isaac’s life occurred in June 1949, when he caught Nat D. Williams’s “Sepia Swing” show for the first time on Memphis’s WDIA. “That was the first black person I heard as a radio announcer,” relates Hayes. “I listened to it and said, ‘Wow, a black man on radio!’” That same month Isaac’s grandparents moved into Memphis. Urban living was a bit of a shock for the seven-year-old Hayes. Out in the country all of the sharecroppers were equally impoverished but, because they grew their own food and there was relatively little to buy, the burden of poverty was light when compared with being poor in the city. In Memphis, you had to buy your food, and there were plenty of other products that were alluring but only attainable if you had the requisite income. A young Isaac Hayes started to understand that all men are not created equal.
“I used to dream,” recalled Isaac, speaking with Phyl Garland in 1970, “just dream about being able to have a warm bed to sleep in and a nice square meal and some decent clothes to wear. But what really tore me up was when we had to split up. We didn’t have a place to go, so my grandparents moved in with an uncle, my sister had to go live with an aunt, and I had to go live with a guy who was a friend of the family.”
After his grandfather died, when he was eleven, Isaac, his sister and grandmother, together and separately, lived all over North Memphis. At one point the three of them were on welfare living in one room over a storefront church. When they were cut off of welfare, they could no longer afford to pay the gas bill, so they used the wood from their outhouse to burn for heat. Consequently, they had no bathroom. Then the family’s utilities were cut off so they had no lights and had to borrow water from a neighbor. The next year, the family ran out of food and Isaac’s grandmother and sister got sick from hunger.
“I lived in so many different places,” Isaac told me many years later. “You can’t imagine, man. We lived in the back of appliance stores, lived in people’s backyards. One time I moved in with this guy who was an alcoholic. He got arrested and I didn’t have anywhere to stay, so I slept in junk cars at a garage.”
To help make ends meet, Isaac worked at the Savoy Theatre, distributed flyers, delivered groceries in a borrowed wagon, hauled wood, and shined shoes down on Beale Street. Despite his efforts, Isaac remained as poor as they came. By the time he reached the ninth grade, he became conscious of both the opposite sex and how ragged his clothes were. Putting two and two together, Isaac noticed that the guys with fine clothes did much better in terms of making time with the girls. Embarrassed by the holes in his shoes and the general state of disrepair of his wardrobe, Isaac dropped out of school.
Forced to return by his grandmother, Isaac attended Manassas High School (at the time, it covered grades one through twelve), where he took vocal music, and began fooling around every chance he got with the school piano. Although he liked music, his stated ambition was to become a doctor.
On many a school day, right after his grandmother walked him to the front doors at Manassas, Isaac bolted out the side entrance. Much of the time he would go to the fields and pick cotton for a black farmer named Armstrong. Buses would come into town early in the morning to take black field hands out to the country. If they missed the bus, they had to try to make it over the Arkansas River bridge and hitch a ride out to the fields. Over time Isaac developed a heavy-duty crush on Armstrong’s daughter. Attempting to impress her, he decided to enter the school talent contest, where he sang Nat King Cole’s 1958 hit “Looking Back.”
Several years earlier, while still in grade four, he and his sister, Willette, had performed in another talent contest, working over Perry Como and Tony Bennett songs. At that time, his voice was light and airy, so his schoolmates nicknamed him the “Swoon Crooner” while teasing him about sounding like a girl. His grade-nine performance was a little bit different, because Isaac’s voice had already dropped a couple of octaves. “I was scared to death,” Hayes remembers, wincing. “They got an auditorium full of people [but] I sang the song and I fell on my knees and the girls just screamed and everything. I got to the bridge of the song, the climax, and that’s when I went down to my knees and they just freaked. I mean the whole house came down. After that I was an instant celebrity on campus and I lost my passion for medicine. I found a new thing. Here’s a poor kid, dressed in rags, holes in his shoes. All of a sudden beautiful girls in the twelfth grade are asking, ‘Ooh, give me your autograph.’ I wanted to make a career of music then because of all the attention and everything.”
By the time Isaac was fifteen, he was singing in the Morning Stars, a gospel quartet that performed weekly at Pleasant Green Baptist Church on Sunday morning. The church’s services were broadcast on radio station WHHN every Sunday night. A short while later, Isaac began singing doo-wop with the Teen Tones, who were proudly decked out in sweaters emblazoned with the letter T, emulating Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ sense of fashion. For a short period Isaac sang with both groups.
The Teen Tones worked out stage routines that they’d use at their infrequent performances at high-school functions and at amateur night at the Palace Theatre on Beale. The emcee at these amateur nights was none other than future Stax star Rufus Thomas, working alongside his comic partner, Bones, and radio announcer Nat D. Williams. The Teen Tones were often in competition with William Bell’s Del-Rios and David Porter’s Marquettes, their repertoire consisting of material such as the Five Royales’ “Tell the Truth” and “Dedicated to the One I Love,” Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ “Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go,” and the Spaniels’ “You’re Gonna Cry.” “We’d get five or six dollars when we’d win and then we’d go buy doughnuts or a hot dog at the Harlem House on Beale and walk back home,” Hayes says, smiling as he warmly cherishes the memory.
The Teen Tones made it into a recording studio where they sang backup in ersatz Jordinaires style for a white artist named Jimmy McCracklin, who recorded under the pseudonym Johnny Rebel.3 While all of this was going down, Isaac also sang for a short while with schoolmate Sidney Kirk in another doo-wop group dubbed the Ambassadors; this group auditioned for Stax, perhaps Isaac’s first trip to the East McLemore studio, but they were turned down.
Back at school in the wake of the talent contest, Isaac was singing in the church choir and took a year of band. He had wanted to play alto saxophone but, because school instruments were limited, he ended up playing the baritone. Alto saxophonist Lucian Coleman, brother of jazz great George Coleman, lived in the neighborhood and in 1959 took Isaac under his wing, teaching him about jazz greats such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Pepper, and Memphis luminaries Frank Strozier and Booker Little. Soon thereafter, Isaac moved in with Coleman. The older musician was kind enough to lend Isaac his alto sax so that Isaac could play alto instead of baritone in the school band.
Getting hooked further by the music bug, Isaac started hanging outside Mitchell’s Hotel on Beale Street and Curry’s Club Tropicana on Thomas Street. Too young to get in, he would stand on garbage cans, peeking in the windows, and pressing his ear to the walls, trying to take in as much as he possibly could. Every Sunday afternoon, Curry’s hosted a jazz jam. On one Sunday in 1961, James Moody was booked to play that evening and stopped by early to take part in the jam. When Isaac finally built up the nerve to say he wanted to come in and sing, Memphis sax great Fred Ford, a.k.a. Daddy Goodlow, smoothed the way for Isaac with the doorman. Isaac eventually summoned up the nerve to get onstage, where he sang Arthur Prysock’s “The Very Thought of You” backed by the house band led by Ben Branch. “When I finished,” Isaac recalls, “Mrs. Curry came over to me and said, ‘Young man, do you want a job?’”
Elated, for the next two years Isaac enjoyed his first professional job, singing one or two songs every Monday, Saturday, and Sunday night with Ben Branch. At the time Branch’s band included Floyd Newman, Herbert Thomas on trumpet, Clarence Nelson on guitar, Big Bell James on drums, and Larry Brown on bass. Brown, along with future Stax producer Allen Jones and Lewie Steinberg, was one of the first electric bass players in Memphis. He was to have an inordinate influence on MG bassist Duck Dunn, and, in an interesting twist of fate, Dunn would eventually replace Brown in Ben Branch’s band.
A short while after Isaac began working with Branch, Lucian Coleman started playing with Calvin and the Swing Cats, a blues band that included Willie Chase on drums, Sidney Kirk on piano, Mickey Gregory on trumpet, and leader Calvin Valentine on guitar.4 Through Coleman’s intercession, Isaac began singing with the group, often working out-of-town gigs, taking the vocal lead on tunes such as “One Room Country Shack” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” Some of the gigs out in the country apparently got pretty rough; Isaac recalls many a night diving behind the piano to avoid flying bullets. Isaac’s second trip to Stax was as a member of Calvin and the Swing Cats; unfortunately, for all concerned, they failed their audition.
During Isaac’s senior year in high school, he briefly formed one other combo, the Missiles, giving him the chance to play sax. The Missiles included one Elmo Harris who, as Eddie Harrison, would sing in the Premiers and record one Stax 45 in September 1965, the haunting “Make It Me,” which coincidentally was one of Hayes and David Porter’s earliest compositions and production efforts. Harrison would later lead the Short Kuts, who recorded a series of 45s for Pepper Records, some cuts of which were written and/or produced by Hayes and Porter.5
While all this professional gigging was occurring, Isaac was finally finishing high school, starring in the Manassas annual show three years in a row. Upon graduating in 1962, he was offered seven different vocal scholarships by the likes of Jackson State, Tennessee State, Florida A & M, Lane College, and Rust College. Unfortunately he was now married and an expectant father, so college was out of the question. Prophetically, a number of Manassas students wrote in his high school yearbook sayings like, “See you on television when you’re famous.” Isaac initially supported his wife and child by working at a meat-packing plant. When gigs were getting scarce in late 1962, Sidney Kirk happened to mention that a new studio had opened at Chelsea and Thomas. Hayes and Kirk walked down to American Sound Studios, met Chips Moman, and asked to audition. Moman was suitably impressed, and Isaac Hayes ended up recording one of the very first releases for Moman and Seymour Rosenberg’s Youngstown label. The A-side, “Laura, We’re on Our Last Go-Round,” was written by a local writer named Patty Ferguson, while the B-side was a cover of Merle Travis and Cliffie Stone’s “Sweet Temptations.”6 Future Stax head engineer Ronnie Capone played drums, Tommy Cogbill played bass, and Sidney Kirk took care of the piano chores. Isaac strictly sang, double-tracking his own harmony part.
According to Moman, for quite a while Isaac came by American just about every day after working at the slaughterhouse, hanging out, writing, and learning about the recording studio. Meanwhile, when the record flopped, Sidney Kirk went into the air force, which, ironically, turned Isaac into a piano player. As Isaac tells it, one day Kirk’s sister, Fanny, called him up saying that Jeb Stuart had just telephoned, desperately in need of a piano player for a New Year’s Eve gig at the Southern Club. She wondered if Isaac wanted to try to fit the bill. Desperate for money, he said yes. The only problem was he hardly knew how to play piano.
“After I accepted it, I broke into a cold sweat,” laughs Isaac. “I was scared to death. I said, ‘What am I doing? I don’t know how to play piano. They’re gonna kill me.’ But, I needed the money. I got there before anybody, just trying to practice on little things that I did know. I started off playing with two fingers and then I added a few more fingers. Being New Year’s Eve the crowd was full of spirits. Had we played ‘Three Blind Mice’ nobody would have given a shit! The club owner came up and said, ‘You know you boys sound pretty good. Y’all want a regular job?’ What put me at ease [was that] none of the other guys could play worth a shit, either. So, I was in good company. That’s how I got started messing around with piano. We took that gig, built a crowd and got a hell of a following.”7
Becoming more proficient on keyboards with each gig, Isaac next joined Floyd Newman’s band at the Plantation Inn, staying onboard as the group’s pianist for some five or six months. He also began writing songs under the pseudonyms Ed Lee and Anthony Mitchell, and played on a couple of Goldwax sessions in Muscle Shoals with Bowlegs Miller behind Spencer Wiggins and James Carr. All of which brings the story back to his playing piano on and cowriting the A-side of Floyd Newman’s “Frog Stomp.” Newman picks up the story. “That’s the first time that Jim Stewart had ever heard him [play piano]. Isaac had an unbelievable ear. He was playing things that he didn’t even know he was playing. But, he heard them and he would play them.” With Booker T. Jones off at college, Isaac Hayes slowly became a regular Stax session musician. As he gained confidence, he slowly began to make suggestions about the arrangements of material. Eventually, he started writing songs with David Porter, inalterably changing the face of Stax Records forever.
A rare shot of Isaac Hayes (back row on the far right), before he began shaving his head, at the WDIA Big Star Show (named after the show’s sponsor, the Big Star grocery). COURTESY THE STAX HISTORICAL PRESERVATION COMMISSION.
Another important addition to the Stax family, Andrew Love, replaced Gilbert Caple at around the same time Newman cut “Frog Stomp.” A graduate of Booker T. Washington, Love had been playing in Memphis nightclubs with the likes of Bowlegs Miller since he was in the tenth grade. Awarded a band scholarship, Love spent two years at Langston University in Oklahoma before heading back to Memphis to make his living as a player. He immediately was hired for sessions at Hi, playing on hit records such as Willie Mitchell’s “20-75” and Gene Simmons’s “Haunted House.” Unable to afford a phone, he eventually moved right across the street from the studio so Willie Mitchell could simply knock on his door whenever he needed him for a session. Al Jackson recommended Love for work at Stax when Gilbert Caple said he was headed to Houston to work in the house band at Duke-Peacock Records.8
Isaac Hayes’ first paid session as a piano player was for Otis Redding. “I was frightened,” relates Hayes, some twenty-two years after the fact. “Here I am in this place I’ve always wanted to be and all these giants have been through there.” At this late date it is impossible to ascertain which of Otis’s 1964 releases featured Hayes for the first time.9 My best guess would be February’s “Come to Me” or April’s “Security.”
“Come to Me” was the top side of Otis’s fourth Volt single. Cowritten by Phil Walden, it’s in Otis’s patented 6/8 ballad mode featuring the ubiquitous piano triplets, this time with the addition of church-derived organ. Curiously, it’s one of only two tracks recorded and released after Redding’s debut Volt session not to feature horns. Peaking at number 69 pop, it undoubtedly would have been a Top 30 R&B hit if Billboard had published an R&B chart that year. The lively self-penned “Security,” unjustly, had next to no chart action. Today, it is regarded as a watershed release in Otis’s early career, featuring for the first time his trademark offbeat horn punctuations dueling with both Cropper’s metallic guitar responses and Otis’s voice following the horn break. The net result is absolutely sublime.
Otis closed the year with “Chained and Bound” in September and “Mr. Pitiful” in December. The latter, in many ways, was a turning point for Otis and Stax. It was the first record to include another of Otis’s distinctive horn patterns, a series of eighths with the offbeats accented. It was also Otis’s first full collaboration as a writer with MG guitarist Steve Cropper, and his first Top 10 R&B and Top 50 pop chart entry. Cropper recalls, “There was a disc jockey here named Moohah [WDIA’s A. C. Williams]. He started calling Otis ‘Mr. Pitiful’ ’cause he sounded so pitiful singing his ballads. So I said, ‘Great idea for a song!’ I got the idea for writing about it in the shower. I was on my way down to pick up Otis. I got down there and I was humming it in the car. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ We just wrote the song on the way to the studio, just slapping our hands on our legs. We wrote it in about ten minutes, went in, showed it to the guys, he hummed a horn line, boom—we had it. When Jim Stewart walked in we had it all worked up. Two or three cuts later, there it was.”
By the time “Mr. Pitiful” was recorded Jim Stewart finally felt secure enough that he left First National Bank and began to devote his energies full-time to Stax. Shortly thereafter, Tom Dowd convinced him and Steve to let Dowd install a two-track recorder. “They said, ‘You’re not gonna lose our sound?’” laughs Dowd. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. We’ll put in the two-track machine and we’ll put the mono in the end of it so you can do both at the same time. If you like the mono better fine, but just don’t erase the two-track.’” Each track was fed by one of the four-input Ampex mixers that Jim had been using since the studio in Brunswick. This meant that any given instrument would be either in one channel or the other, leading to the bizarre situation where the vocals and echo would be in one channel only. This, of course, only affected LP releases. The majority of the company’s business was still conducted in singles which, at the time, were still issued exclusively in mono.
The B-side of “Mr. Pitiful,” Roosevelt Jamison’s and Steve Cropper’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” is one of the pluperfect R&B ballads of all time. Jamison had originally taken it to a Stax Saturday morning audition, where Cropper had helped to refashion the lyrics. Nothing happened immediately though, and Jamison took it to another Memphis R&B label, Goldwax Records, where he cut it with O. V Wright. In the meantime, Cropper recorded the song with Otis. Wright’s and Redding’s versions were released within days of each other and the Rolling Stones recorded it shortly thereafter, the combined impact of their versions making it an instant soul classic.
Both tracks were recorded as fall turned to winter. At Stax that meant coats and gloves for the horn players. The studio was equipped with a single heater that was positioned right next to Al Jackson’s drum booth. “That one heater was going,” laughs Wayne Jackson, “and Al Jackson would be in a T-shirt sweating. We’d be across the room in our overcoats and gloves it was so cold in there!”
By year’s end, Otis had cut his second LP, most of the tracks featuring Isaac Hayes on piano or organ. The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads (Volt 711) was issued in March 1965, and has the distinction of being the first album to be released on Volt.10 As Soul Ballads was beginning its run up the charts, Stax was readying the release of Otis’s seventh Volt single, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Cowritten with Jerry Butler in a Buffalo hotel room, it represented Redding’s greatest commercial success until “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” Its success was very nearly duplicated in August by “Respect,” one of Otis’s finest up-tempo romps. Fueled by Duck Dunn’s imaginative pulsing bass figure and Al Jackson’s flat-sounding four-on-the-floor snare pattern (replete with machine-gun blasts), the track is transcendent. The second voice on the “hey hey hey” hook is that of label compadre William Bell.
Both singles were recut in stereo during the July 1965 sessions for the Otis Blue album. The only noticeable difference on “Respect” was that Otis’s longtime friend and road manager Earl “Speedo” Sims sings the “hey hey hey” line. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” on the other hand, underwent substantial change. Otis had performed it regularly onstage and had gained a much better feel for the song. With a slowed-down tempo, doubly dramatic stop-time pauses, increased use of dynamics, much more potent horns, and an achingly impassioned vocal, it’s one of the finest Otis Redding recordings ever.
For Wayne Jackson, the horn lines served the function of background vocals. “The horn is like a voice,” explains the trumpeter, “but you’re limited as to what you can do. You don’t have syllables so you have to use dynamics tastefully That’s the one way you have of getting across your breath without having a syllable to say. ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ has great horn parts. You can almost hear the horns saying the words in that record. They’re also used like a rhythm instrument on the stop line—definite punctuation.”
Otis worked extremely quickly. Otis Blue was recorded in one amazing adrenaline-charged twenty-four-hour period. With Tom Dowd coming down from New York Thursday night to work the board, the session began at ten the next morning. Around eight o’clock that night the festivities came to a halt as several of the session musicians had to head off to their nightly gigs. Everyone reconvened at two in the morning after the clubs closed and went straight through the night until ten the next morning, and then Otis flew out for a gig the next day.11
The story of how the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” came to be included on this album provides fascinating insight into the creative process at Stax. Apparently Otis took a brief break from the sessions to have a physical for insurance purposes. Scrounging for material to round out the album, Steve Cropper had a brainstorm: “It was my idea to do it. I went up to the front of the record shop, got a copy of the [Stones] record, played it for the band and wrote down the lyrics. You notice on ‘Satisfaction’ that Otis said ‘fashion,’ not ‘faction.’ I love it. That’s what made him so unique. He’d just barrel right through that stuff unaware of anything. He just didn’t know the song. He hadn’t heard it as far as I know.” Phil Walden concurs: “Otis kind of read the lyrics through about once or twice and then just really jumped right into the thing. That was a real spontaneous record. He had never heard the Rolling Stones version.”
In the Stax studio: (left to right) Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Tom Dowd, David Porter, Julius Green of the Mad Lads (seated with his back to the camera), Andrew Love, Floyd Newman, Wayne Jackson, Isaac Hayes, COURTESY API PHOTOGRAPHERS INC.
Released in September 1965, Otis Blue represented a quantum leap for both Otis Redding and the Stax house band of Booker T. and the MG’s, Isaac Hayes, and the Mar-Key horns (at this point consisting of Wayne Jackson, Andrew Love, and Floyd Newman, with Bowlegs Miller guesting on second trumpet). Whereas on many of Otis’s earlier recordings he sounded tentative, feeling his way through a song, on Otis Blue he roars like a locomotive. From this point on in Otis’s career, extremes become more apparent: tempos become either faster or slower and the parts hit harder or are treated in a gentler fashion.
A good example is provided by Otis’s cover of Sam Cooke’s swansong, “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It’s hard to imagine anyone cutting Cooke on his own song, but Otis and the Stax house band do just that. The triplet and two eighths rhythmic interjection is merely a whisper in Cooke’s original; on Otis Blue it sounds like a sledgehammer. Otis is at his elliptical best with words, sometimes syllables, bursting from his vocal chords one moment, being swallowed and garbled the next. Emotion is the governing aesthetic throughout.
“I think he was more sophisticated and aware of who he was,” suggests manager Phil Walden. “He was successful and he liked that lifestyle, being a star and having people like him. He was into being Otis Redding and I think it reflects in his music. He was a real star finally, not something we tried to fabricate. We could turn to album sales, which was fairly unique for black artists in those days.” Wayne Jackson agrees with Walden: “As he gained in stature as an artist with worldwide fame, his confidence level went up. He didn’t change as a performer, I think he just got better.”
Walden had just returned trom a two-year hitch in the army and was both ecstatic and astonished by the session. “Everything was so up. He was finally feeling like a star. You could sense it. Everything happened right, just knocking out songs like this [snaps fingers]. Of course, I didn’t know that everybody didn’t do it this way, and Tom Dowd’s going, ‘Phew, this damn guy is a genius.’ I said, ‘Really?’ I knew Dowd had worked with everybody and he said, ‘I’ve only been in the studio with two other people that are in this category, Bobby Darin and Ray Charles.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding me, my Otis?’” Dowd remembers the conversation well. “I said, ‘Man, this guy’s in charge like Bobby Darin was. He knows what the hell he wants. Otis was a very strong individual. He did not have the acumen or the experience musically to be able to say, ‘More like this or more like that.’ He’d just say, ‘That ain’t right’ and he’d sing a part to you.”
Upon its release in September 1965, Otis Blue stayed on the pop LP charts for thirty-four weeks, peaking at number 75, and reached the number 1 spot on the Top R&B LP chart. In addition to achieving these peaks, the album stayed on the charts for several months. Redding had become what is known as a “catalogue” artist. His records tended to sell steadily over long periods of time, reaching sales ranging anywhere from 200,000 to 250,000 copies, rather than selling in massive numbers immediately upon release and then cooling off equally quickly.
Shortly after Otis Blue was recorded, Otis, in partnership with Joe Galkin and Phil and Alan Walden, formed a production company, Jotis Records (the name being derived by putting the J from Joe Galkin’s name in front of Otis), and a publishing arm, Redwal Music (Redding and Walden). Jotis lasted for only four releases, two by Arthur Conley, and one each by Billy Young (an army acquaintance of Phil Walden’s) and Loretta Williams (a singer with Otis’s road band). In 1966, Otis produced two further singles by Conley on Fame, before switching him over to Atco and hitting it big with “Sweet Soul Music” in the spring of 1967. Based on Sam Cooke’s “Yeah Man,” and with a horn intro variously attributed to a riff taken from either a Maxwell House coffee or a Marlboro cigarettes commercial, “Sweet Soul Music” soared to number 2 on both the pop and R&B charts.
Several months earlier, in May 1965, just after “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” entered the Billboard charts, Stax and Atlantic finally formalized their distribution agreement, setting down in a legal contract what had existed for years as a handshake deal. Atlantic’s owners had begun discussing the possibility of selling the company, and Jerry Wexler suggested to Jim Stewart that a written contract could protect Stewart. Stewart was worried that Atlantic could possibly be sold to a corporation that was not interested in or did not understand Stax’s recordings or its market. He insisted on a clause in the thirteen-page document that would allow him to sever the distribution deal with Atlantic immediately should the company ever be sold and Jerry Wexler not remain a stockholder or employee, and within 180 days if the company should be sold and Wexler remained an employee but not a stockholder.
The contract gave Atlantic the exclusive right, but not obligation, to “distribute” any master Stax produced or otherwise acquired. Until Atlantic exercised that right on a given record, Stax could release “such master recordings in your local market, in order to test the salability thereof.” Stax had to produce and offer a minimum of six master recordings (e.g., three singles) during a given year.12 In return, Stax was to be paid by Atlantic fifteen cents for single records and 10 percent of the retail list price of LPs, less taxes, duties, and costs of packaging, for 90 percent of all items sold and paid for in the United States.13 Stax was to receive 50 percent of these amounts for records sold through record clubs, and 50 percent of whatever Atlantic received for records sold outside the United States. Stax was obligated to pay mechanical royalties for all singles sold, while Atlantic assumed this obligation for LPs. Stax was also obligated to pay all moneys owed to recording artists.
While it wasn’t overly generous, there was nothing particularly onerous or untoward about this agreement, with one very major exception. From the beginning of the contract, it spoke of Atlantic’s right “to purchase master recordings” from Stax. Paragraph 6C, page 7, was even more specific:
You hereby sell, assign and transfer to us, our successors or assigns, absolutely and forever and without any limitations or restrictions whatever, not specifically set forth herein, the entire right, title and interest in and to each of such masters and to each of the performances embodied thereon.
Jerry Wexler has always maintained that Atlantic’s lawyers slipped this clause in, and that he was entirely unaware of it. However, if Wexler had perused the contract, it would have been clear that this was a legal instrument that gave Atlantic full ownership of Stax productions. In other words, this was not a master lease or distribution contract as understood by Jim Stewart, it was a master purchase contract.14 Even more devastating, paragraph 12 on page 11 gave Atlantic the same rights to all Stax productions they had distributed prior to May 17, 1965. In one stroke of the pen, for one dollar, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton lost the rights to their entire catalogue.
It is easy to think that, if Jim Stewart signed it, that’s his problem. But it is important to understand that Jim Stewart was every inch a product of the fraternal, personalized South: a person’s handshake and word were more important than any contract. Stewart trusted Wexler implicitly; he didn’t read the contract or consult a lawyer, or feel the need to do so. His friend, and to some degree mentor and trusted adviser, Wexler had assured him that the contract was a mere formality that would protect him, as he had desired, if Atlantic should ever be sold.
By the summer of 1965, the notion of “The Memphis Sound” was being discussed in the industry’s trade magazines. In the June 12th issue of Billboard, Elton Whisenhunt wrote a piece headlined “Memphis Sound: A Southern View.” Whisenhunt conducted brief interviews with Memphis record label owners Joe Cuoghi, Sam Phillips, Stan Kesler, and Jim Stewart. Stewart described “the Memphis Sound” this way:
It goes back to the colored influence in the early blues and folk lore [sic] music of the South. Our music is still influenced by that.
All our artists at Stax are Negroes. Naturally, our sound is directly oriented in that direction. The sound is hard to describe. It has a heavy back beat. We accent the beat and rhythm in our recordings. It is very dominant. New York recordings wouldn’t bring out the drums or beat as we do.
But that beat—a hard rhythm section—is an integral part of our sound. The combination of horns, instead of a smooth sound, produces a rough, growly, rasping sound, which carries into the melody. To add flavor and color there is topping with the piano and fills with the guitar or vocal group.15
Stewart told me in 1986: “That title [‘the Memphis sound’] came from outside. We didn’t give it to ourselves. It sort of drifted back to us that there was a sound. We really weren’t thinking about it. We came to work every day, we did what we had to do, and we went our separate ways. It was a job, but it was fun. It was just an identification thing simply because the same people were doing it day after day—seven people that were doing God knows how many releases a year.” “You’re going to obviously have an identifiable sound, especially if it’s coming out of the same studio,” affirms Booker.
Deanie Parker remembers that once the company became cognizant of the outside world’s perception, Stax actively promoted “the Memphis Sound.” “We were promoting the Memphis sound as a whole and trying to give a definition of a Stax sound. We focused on that to a large degree. I think that partially that happened because the question was asked so often, ‘What is [the Memphis Sound]?’ So we were given an opportunity to tag what it was that we felt we were creating.” When Al Bell came to the company later that year, he insisted that “The Memphis Sound” be inscribed on virtually every piece of paper that emanated from the company.
Five days before the new Stax-Atlantic distribution agreement was signed, Jerry Wexler brought Wilson Pickett down to Memphis. Born in Prattville, Alabama, in 1941, Pickett was possessed of one of the harshest voices in soul music. Moving to Detroit in his early teens, he started out singing gospel with Chess recording artists the Violinaires. When he was eighteen he elected to go the secular route and signed on with the Falcons, whose membership included future Stax songwriters and vocalists Eddie Floyd and Mack Rice. With the Falcons, Pickett sang lead on the hit “I Found a Love.” Egos being what they are, he quickly became a solo artist, signing on with Double L. Three chart singles later, Wexler wooed him to Atlantic. His first Atlantic single was recorded in New York at the company’s studios but, when no one was happy with the results, Wexler hit on the bright idea of taking him down to Stax.
“I couldn’t get over [the way they recorded in Memphis],” explains Wexler. “Coming to Stax literally changed my life. I took Wilson Pickett down there because entropy was setting in in New York … I lost interest in recording with the same arrangers who were out of ideas. The musicians were out of licks [and] the songwriters didn’t have any songs. It got so I dreaded to go into the studio to make a record with the foreboding that I was gonna come out with the same dreadful piece of crap that we did last time with no fire in it, no originality and, worst of all, no hit potential. … When I went down to Stax and saw how they made records, it was really inspirational. The idea of coming to a place [like Stax] where four guys come to work like four cabinetmakers or four plumbers and hang up their coats and start playing music in the morning, and then the beautifully crafted records that came out of this! God, can I get some of this, ’cause this is the way to go. I’ve never changed since then. That was it. That was the way to make records.”
Wexler and Pickett made three trips down to Memphis in May, September, and December 1965. Altogether nine songs were recorded, the first session producing “In the Midnight Hour” and “Don’t Fight It,” the last giving birth to “634-5789 (Soulsville U.S.A.)” and “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do).” Booker was away attending university during all three sessions, so Joe Hall played piano in May, and Isaac Hayes in September and December. Pickett was so happy with the success of the first session that he personally sent a $100 bonus to each member of the Stax house band, a virtually unheard-of gesture.
It was during the May sessions that the Stax rhythmic conception of a minutely delayed beat two and four was developed, inspired by Wexler’s dancing of the then-new northern fad, the Jerk. This rhythm can be heard on all subsequent 1960s up-tempo Stax recordings, including “Hold On! I’m Comin’,” “Respect,” “Knock on Wood,” and “Soul Man,” and remains one of the essential defining features of the Stax sound. To some degree, the Stax rhythm section had always slightly delayed the beat, but with “Midnight Hour” it was to become that much more pronounced. “I credit it to the fact that we didn’t play with headphones and we were in a big room,” reasons Steve Cropper. “There was a lot of delay between the singer and us. When you put headphones on, everybody just sort of tightens up. We learned to overcome [not wearing headphones]. I had to learn basically to play watching Al [Jackson]’s left hand rather than by going by what I heard in my head. I started anticipating. When he was coming down, I’d come down with him. Rather than wait for the sound to get over to me, I’d go with his hands. … Obviously, everything would have fallen apart if we had just followed the delay time, but we learned how to catch up and get the downbeat on.
“The Jerk was a delayed backbeat thing. The first time that Al [Jackson] and I became aware of it, we found it in Detroit. It was the way the kids were dancing. When Jerry Wexler was down there helping to produce ‘Midnight Hour,’ he made a whole thing about this move, this delayed backbeat thing. We started being more conscious of putting the kick drumbeat dead on and delaying the ‘two, four,’ which became an actual physical thing, not room delay at that point. We worked on that. That was not something that was accidental. So, we started overemphasizing that and made it a whole way of life because it seemed to work all the time. It was never behind the beat, it’s just delayed. It’s like if you put it in a little time cube and you turned the switch and then you only play the delay part, rather than the accent. That’s what came out.”
Cropper takes great pains to point out that after a drum fill at the end of a section, they would very deliberately play the second beat dead on to synchronize the groove again before resuming delaying the backbeat on each subsequent bar.
Vocalists at Stax also tended to phrase in a slightly delayed manner. This was a natural result of standing some fifteen feet from the drummer behind a tall baffle, without wearing headphones. “They had to hear what came over the top, and bounced off the ceiling,” explains Steve, “so there was definitely a delay in the room which always kept the singer just a little back so it never ran away. That’s why I think the Stax stuff always felt so good.”
“In the Midnight Hour,” cowritten by Pickett and Steve Cropper, became a massive radio hit, topping the R&B charts at number 1 while also scaling the pop charts to number 21. Surprisingly, according to Jim Stewart, it only sold about 300,000 copies. “6345789 (Soulsville U.S.A.),” written by Cropper and Eddie Floyd, did a little better, resting at the top of the R&B charts for a full seven weeks while peaking at number 13 on the pop charts. “Don’t Fight It” and “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do),” both coauthored by Pickett and Cropper, also charted.16
Buoyed by the success of the first Pickett session, at the end of June Atlantic brought Don Covay down to Memphis to record with the MG’s and to avail himself of the Stax songwriters. Four songs, “See-Saw,” “I Never Get Enough of Your Love,” “Sookie Sookie,” and “Iron Out the Rough Spots,” were recorded; the first three were cowritten by Covay and Steve Cropper, while Cropper, Booker T. Jones, and David Porter cowrote the last. “See-Saw” was the only hit, reaching number 5 on the R&B charts and number 44 on the pop charts. “Sookie Sookie” was later covered by the rock group Steppenwolf.
In the Stax studio: (left to right) David Porter (holding guitar) Steve Cropper, Don Covay, Jim Stewart. COURTESY RON CAPONE.
According to Steve Cropper, the Covay sessions at times got a little rocky. “I remember that Jim Stewart called Jerry Wexler and said, ‘Get Don Covay out of here. He’s driving us nuts.’ Don Covay was a little bit on the weird side. I loved Don to death. We get along great but I don’t think Jim and them understood Don. He thinks in different areas and he was kind of driving people bananas. … He’s kind of frantic when he makes decisions. He jumps from this place to that. You never know what he’s gonna do next.” Covay’s high energy level and extreme unpredictability were the antithesis of Jim Stewart’s banker personality.
In exchange for the use of the Stax studio and musicians, Stax split with Atlantic the publishing and received an override from all sales of Atlantic product recorded at Stax. Given the success of the Pickett and Covay sessions, one would have expected Atlantic to bring a host of artists down to Memphis to record with the MG’s at Stax’s 926 E. McLemore studio. According to Jim Stewart, such a possibility was unfortunately precluded by Wilson Pickett’s irascible personality. “It got to the point,” explains Stewart, “where the guys felt they were being used, so I stopped it. They weren’t getting much money for that stuff. Another thing was a personal relationship. Pickett got to be an asshole. They told me, ‘Forget it, man, get his ass out of here.’ The guys didn’t want to work with him, and I wouldn’t ask them to do it.”
Both Steve and Duck deny any ill feelings toward Pickett. While both agree the singer could be difficult, Cropper stresses that that was only when he drank, and at Stax in the mid-sixties, no one, including Pickett, drank or did drugs at daytime sessions. “I don’t know if there was a joint ever lit up in that place,” Steve recalls, laughing. “Pretty weird, isn’t it? Mainly daytime recording, mainly everybody was sober. There was a thing in those days: you drink at night and you sobered up in the morning. Guys didn’t drink during the daytime. [If you did] you were considered a bum and an alcoholic.”17
Cropper also takes pains to point out that he was making a lot of money off the songwriting on the Pickett sessions, and would have loved that situation to continue. Duck, while not sharing in the songwriting, stresses that Pickett was one of the greatest singers he ever worked with and, consequently, he loved those sessions. Jim simply told Wexler and Atlantic that the Stax studio was too busy to accommodate outside sessions and consequently would no longer be able to do them. Steve, Duck, and Jerry Wexler felt that the real reason why Stax closed its doors to outside sessions was that Jim Stewart was not happy “giving away” the Stax sound.
“[Jim] was vague,” recalls Wexler. “I knew that Pickett had irritated him. Pickett was always bum-rapping Steve Cropper, claiming that Steve had stolen the song [‘In the Midnight Hour’], but I never could get any exact reason. I got a feeling after a while that the real reason was that Jim had some feeling about hits coming out of the studio that were not on Stax [yet were recorded] with his band and his facilities. They really didn’t want anybody else there ’cause they didn’t want hits coming out of there with their imprimatur that they didn’t get the full benefit of.”
Al Bell, who arrived at the company just a few months before the final Pickett session, echoes Wexler’s suspicions: “We had that policy to preserve the sound that we had developed. That was our identity, our trademark, our trade secret, and we preserved it in that fashion. The other thing was there really wasn’t that much time, because the studio was constantly being used. When it wasn’t being used, it was supposed to be available for in-house producers and writers, because what made Stax tick was that freedom, the ability to go in that studio whenever a guy had an idea and get it with no restrictions, no clock to watch, none of that. Just to be able to record and record until you got it. If it took all day or it took all week, we had that freedom to do it.”18
A couple of months prior to the first Pickett session, Atlantic had made a rather unique arrangement with Stax. Wexler offered to loan Sam and Dave to Stax for as long as Atlantic distributed the Memphis company. Sam and Dave, in essence, would be full-fledged Stax artists, with Stax being paid the same money for every Sam and Dave record sold as they were for records by their other artists (minus Sam and Dave’s royalty and an override to Henry Stone). The only difference was that Wexler insisted that Stax split the publishing with Atlantic on any songs written by Stax staff songwriters for Sam and Dave. This latter proviso would turn out to be a wise move on Wexler’s part.
Born in 1935 in Miami, Florida, Sam Moore was the son of a church deacon; his mother sang in the church choir, and his grandfather was a minister. In addition, the Moore family was related to the gospel legends Albertina Walker and Ruth Davis and the Davis Sisters. Singing his first solo in church at the age of nine (“I wasn’t nervous. I was a big show-off”), Sam did not develop an interest in secular music, initially doo-wop, until a little bit later, and somewhat against his parents’ wishes. “Oh yes, they didn’t like to hear the Chuck Berrys, the Fats Dominos, and James Browns,” Sam recalls. “So, I would sneak out if I wanted to stand on the street corners and sing with the guys. Never could I bring a rock ‘n’ roll record in the house.”19
One aggregation of Sam’s street-corner pals that centered around his high school eventually coalesced as a quartet called the Majestics. They were together for two-and-a-half years, working with a similar repertoire as the Royal Spades in Memphis, covering tunes by R&B stars of the day such as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Five Royales, and the Coasters. Playing high-school hops, they eventually became good enough to attract the attention of Henry Stone, the godfather of the Miami record scene, who owned and operated a distributorship (Tone), a studio (Federal), and several labels (Marlin, Alston, and Shot). The group recorded one single for Marlin, a prototypical talking doo-wop, “Nitey Nite” (sic) backed with “Cave Man Rock.” Released in late 1954, the record generated a little local notoriety but not much else. By 1957, the Majestics had changed their name to the Gales (after the nationally popular Sensational Nightingales), left the secular world behind, and embarked upon a gospel career.
When the Gales folded two years later, Sam joined another local quartet, the Melionaires. One hot night the Melionaires found themselves opening up for Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. This coincidence eventually led to Sam Moore being offered the almost impossible job of replacing Cooke when the latter decided to leave the gospel world. At the last moment Sam backed out, deciding the gospel life was not for him. “I got chicken,” demurs Sam. “The night before I was to go with the Soul Stirrers I went to a show to see Jackie Wilson. I saw the electrification, the excitement. Oh God, he was a hell of a showman. I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ [The next day the Soul Stirrers] looked for me. I just disappeared.” Ironically, Sam’s later Stax-mate, Johnnie Taylor, then of the Highway QCs, ended up taking the job.
Realizing his true calling belonged in the world of secular ecstasy, Sam left the Melionaires soon after and took to the amateur circuit, imitating his heroes. “When I started out I knew nothing about the business,” confesses Sam. “The only thing I knew was to stand behind a microphone and sing. I enjoyed singing songs by Jackie Wilson, Little Willie John, and Sam Cooke. I’m a gospel man.” The latter comment is telling. Even more than these three role models, Sam was never able to shake his gospel background, always incorporating the melismas, playful voicedness, and sheer intensity that has forever been the essence of black church singing. In the spring of 1961, it was dropping tentatively to his knees—a trick he learned from mentor Jackie Wilson—while singing tunes such as “Danny Boy” that won Moore first prize in a local amateur show, twenty-five dollars, and a job as amateur-night emcee of a local bastion of Miami black nightlife, the King of Hearts club. Sam worked Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday and when he wasn’t emceeing, in his own words, he fulfilled the role of a lounge singer.
On one of those amateur nights in December 1961, who should walk in but Dave Prater, Jr. Prater originally hailed from the tiny town of Ocilla, Georgia (pop. c. 3,000), about five hundred miles north of Miami. Born May 9, 1937, Dave waited twenty-two years before heading to the city, wooed by his brother, bass singer J.T. Prater, to join J.T.’s gospel group, the Sensational Hummingbirds, as lead singer. The Hummingbirds pounded the gospel circuit and recorded one 45 over a period of two years while Dave worked in the daytime, first as a cashier and later as a short-order cook. Dave had known Sam through their respective gospel quartets, and now Dave also intended to test the secular waters via the traditional route of the amateur show. He had planned to sing Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World,” but the house band at the King of Hearts did not know the song. The band suggested Jackie Wilson’s “Doggin’ Around” as an alternative, but Dave didn’t know all the words. “But I knew the words,” remembers Sam. “So I said to him, ‘Look, if you start singing I’ll pipe the words to you from the back ’cause I’m going to be up onstage.’ So he started, and when he got to the verse part I would just say [the words] and he would sing them.
“When it got to the part where Jackie Wilson would drop to his knees, Dave tripped. I was responsible for all the instruments and microphones that got broken and I didn’t want to pay for something that I didn’t do, so he and I both went down together and I caught the mike. The audience thought that was the act. It wasn’t, but they went crazy.” What Sam fails to mentions is that, not only did he catch the mike, he also came up singing, something that would also become a hallmark of Sam and Dave shows for years to come. That night, with the glowing approval of owner John Lomello, Sam and Dave started working the club as a duo.
At this point Henry Stone reentered the picture, recording Sam and Dave locally for both his Alston and Marlin labels. Two singles appeared, “Never Never” b/w “Lotta Lovin’” and “My Love Belongs to You” b/w “No More Pain,”20 both produced by Steve Alaimo (of “Everyday I Have to Cry” fame) and distributed only in southern Florida by Stone’s Tone Distributors. Stone next engineered a deal for the duo with Morris Levy’s Roulette label. Five 45s appeared sporadically on Roulette through 1962-63.21
Produced by either Roulette A&R man Henry Glover or Steve Alaimo, the records echo the sounds of Sam Cooke, the Soul Stirrers, Ray Charles, and Jackie Wilson. One of the songs, “She’s Alright,” was actually written by Wilson, and the astute listener can pick out Jackie singing background harmony. Another side, the sweet ballad “It Was So Nice While It Lasted,” was written by Johnny Nash under the name “Billy Nash.” Sam and Dave themselves cowrote two songs, “My Love Belongs to You” and “I Need Love.” The Roulette records are radically different from the better-known Stax recordings.22 At Stax, Sam assumed the role of lead dynamo with Dave functioning as his foil. At Roulette, Dave was featured much more. Even more pertinent, the writing and playing on the Roulette recordings is largely imitative with some songs, such as Steve Alaimo’s “No More Pain,” being literal cops of other recordings (in this case the Soul Stirrers’ “I’ll Build a Fence”).
The Roulette singles and Sam and Dave’s local notoriety at the King of Hearts served to spread their name nationally to those in the know, including Atlantic Records co-owner Jerry Wexler. In town for a disc jockey convention in Miami Beach in late summer 1964, after a hectic day of glad-handing, Wexler stopped by the King of Hearts. “It was 165 degrees in the middle of summer,” recalls Wexler. “It was unbelievable. It was hot and they were hot. Henry Stone was the one who steered me there. It was wall-to-wall people. We were the only Caucasians in there. Ahmet [Ertegun, Wexler’s partner at Atlantic] and I are out there boogalooing like fools, sweating and just having a ball. It was so exciting. I don’t know if we were trying to impress Sam and Dave, Henry Stone, or just knock our own selves out, but we really got into the spirit of things. When I heard them there that night, that’s all she wrote. I signed them up immediately.
“I thought it would be great to have Stax produce them. So I went to Jim Stewart and said, ‘I want you to produce these guys and in consideration it can be released on Stax and we’ll pay you the regular Stax royalty. You pay them just as though they’re your artists but always with the understanding that this is on loan from us. We have the master contract.’”
It was an ingenious and inspired move on Wexler’s part. Ironically, the reaction at Stax to the arrival of Sam and Dave was largely one of indifference. “There was no one interested in Sam and Dave,” remarks songwriter David Porter. “It was like a throwaway kind of situation [to] see if anything could happen with them … so I developed a relationship with Sam Moore and Dave Prater which involved me trying to come up with material for them. No one else at the time was even thinking about it.”
A native Memphian, Porter had been trying to work his way into a music career for quite some time. While in high school at Booker T. Washington, Porter had formed a quartet he dubbed the Marquettes that regularly competed in the Wednesday evening talent shows at Beale Street’s Palace Theatre. Under the watchful eye of MC Rufus Thomas, the Marquettes often competed with Isaac Hayes’s group, the Teen Tones, the Marquettes’ specialty being a version of the Dell-Vikings’ “Come Go with Me.” “When I first met Isaac during that time,” laughs Porter, “I wasn’t too fond of him because he was beating me out of the five dollars [prize money]. He felt likewise. We knew each other but we were not running buddies.”
When not entering talent shows, the Marquettes were busy auditioning for every record label in town that would listen to them. Jim Stewart was impressed enough to attempt to record a single. At Stewart’s suggestion they worked on “The Old Grey Mare,” but were never able to cut a version that was deemed releasable. After the initial attempts, Porter, commonly referred to as the local Sam Cooke, opted to record the song without the Marquettes, eventually bringing in the Del-Rios to sing background. But, alas, success was still not forthcoming.
Undaunted, Porter, while working across the street at Jones’ Big D Grocery and selling insurance to support his wife and child, struck up a songwriting relationship with Chips Moman. Moman and Porter penned a number of songs with such unpromising titles as “Treasured Moments” and “Woe Is Me” before Moman’s acrimonious split with Stewart and Axton curtailed their activity. Porter next started writing with Rufus Thomas’s son, Marvell. The pair’s debut effort, “The Life I Live,” was waxed by Barbara Stephens and released on Satellite in October 1961.
It would be a few years before Porter’s name would next appear on a Stax-related release. “They were trying to get me to stop hanging around there,” Porter exclaims. “Jim Stewart didn’t think I had any talent.” Fortunately for David, Estelle Axton thought differently. “She believed in me all the time,” continues Porter. “He was trying to get rid of me. She was trying to keep me around. There was a great amount of discussion about me because I was a pest! I wanted to be in the music business. I had no idea how to contact anybody exterior of Memphis. I’m a poor kid. I don’t know anything about calling anybody in New York.
“Jim was not a great motivator for me, but his sister was. She was saying, ‘Study these records.’ I would go in the Satellite Record Shop and play records and scratch them up. She was such a beautiful lady. She would say, ‘Well, okay. Just go and study that and see what they’re doing. You’ve got to see what everybody else is doing so you’ll know what to do.’”
Not one to give up, Porter kept working on his writing skills while continuing to make the rounds to see if anyone was interested in recording him as an artist. In mid-1962 he recorded a Clyde McPhatter-influenced outing for the Golden Eagle label, “Farewell” b/w “Chivalry.” Despite being a bit of a regional breakout, “Farewell” ultimately made few waves. Later that year Porter recorded another 45, this time for Hi Records, under the name Kenny Cain. Hi co-owner Ray Harris told Porter that he wanted to develop a black artist who sounded white. Produced by Willie Mitchell, “Practice Makes Perfect” b/w “Words Can Never Say” was released just before the close of 1962. Porter also made a session for Savoy Records under the auspices of Fred Mendelssohn, “So Long” b/w “Home Is Where You Come,” which was released under the nom de disque of Little David, because Porter assumed he was still under contract to Golden Eagle. None of these records achieved significant radio play or sales and, consequently, Porter continued to plug away at Stax, hoping to record and/or write songs. For a short time he dabbled in writing with Steve Cropper, “but our chemistry just wasn’t quite right for it.” He did, though, serve as the vocalist with the MG’s on many of their weekend gigs that required a singer.
Sometime in 1964, not too long after Isaac Hayes began playing sessions at Stax, Porter suggested they write songs together. Hayes, who had gradually begun to contribute arrangement ideas on Stax sessions and had been harboring ambitions as a writer, was more than interested. Hayes and Porter’s first efforts to be released on Stax were Porter’s lone Stax solo single in the 1960s, “Can’t See You When I Want To” (Stax 163) and Carla Thomas’s “How Do You Quit (Someone You Love)” (Atlantic 2272), released in January and February 1965, respectively. The Thomas release attained a modicum of success, rising to number 39 on the pop charts. On both 45s, Hayes wrote under the pseudonym Ed Lee to avoid breaking a previous publishing commitment.
At some point, most likely in the summer or fall of 1965, Hayes and Porter, frustrated with their progress at Stax, visited their old friend Chips Moman at American Sound Studio. They formed the Genie label, jointly owned by Hayes, Porter, Moman, and Harold Atkins. The sole release on Genie was a single by future Stax songwriter Homer Banks. Porter knew Banks from Booker T. Washington High School and, with Hayes, wrote both sides of the single, “Little Lady of Stone” b/w “Sweetie Pie.” The record failed to create any waves, few of the five hundred copies pressed actually being purchased. When Jim Stewart finally offered Porter a songwriting contract with a weekly draw, Genie was laid to rest.23 As was the case with Steve Cropper, it was Estelle Axton who forced Jim to put David Porter on salary. “Jim Stewart gave me six months to make it or get out,” rues Porter a quarter-century later. “Estelle Axton believed in me and he didn’t. But, he was nice enough to give me the chance. Estelle had mortgaged the house so he couldn’t refuse her and she was my biggest supporter.”
Estelle vividly recalls the day Porter came into the record shop with the lyrics for “Can’t See You When I Want To.” “He had about three sheets of lyrics. So I sat down and I read his song. I saw he had a good idea but then I began to work on him. I said, ‘David, there is no way possible that you could put this many lyrics in a song. You’d run ten minutes.’” Estelle had a happy knack for simultaneously critiquing and encouraging. Buoyed by her comments, David would go away, rewrite the song, and then bring it back. Estelle would then discuss the changes David had made, play some more records for him by way of illustration, and send him off again. She continued to work with David in this fashion for several months. Porter’s weekly draw amounted to fifty dollars a week, which he shared with Isaac Hayes, who was still working in the meat-packing plant. Nonetheless, his foot was finally in the door. Sam and Dave would be the vehicle by which Porter and Hayes would get the key to the castle.
Sam and Dave’s first single for Stax, “Goodnight Baby” b/w “A Place Nobody Can Find,” coupled a Porter-Cropper composition with a rare example of a David Porter solo composition.24 Released in March 1965, both sides of the single featured Dave Prater singing lead, in marked contrast to Sam and Dave’s later Stax recordings. On “Goodnight Baby” David Porter lovingly juxtaposed organ and vibes, the latter being a direct influence of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s work at Motown with the Supremes. “Part of what eventually evolved into the magic of Hayes and Porter’s writing was my study of the Motown catalogue and what Holland-Dozier-Holland were doing,” Porter emphasizes. “That was an ongoing process. I was a novice. To be quite honest I was learning. So [the vibes] was a thought and we tried it.” On top of the arrangement, Sam and Dave are singing in glorious harmony, wringing Porter’s lyric for all it’s worth. One can readily hear how close their three-and-a-half years together had brought them. They answer, echo, and finish each other’s lines, join in and drop out of the arrangement, individually and together, with a grace and ease that is mesmerizing. The whole is brought to a climax with an ad-lib ending that is pure ecstasy, both singers emoting in overdrive against the horns and rhythm section.
Despite the obvious strength of this initial effort, the single’s success was somewhat underwhelming, and four months passed before Sam and Dave reentered the Stax studio to cut a followup. For the duo’s second Stax release, Hayes and Porter wrote and produced both “I Take What I Want” and “Sweet Home.” Future Hi session guitarist Teenie Hodges shares in the credit on the A-side. According to Porter, Teenie was like a little brother who often hung around the Stax studio. On this particular day Porter hummed the guitar line to Teenie, who then played it on the record. To encourage him to write, Porter and Hayes also gave him a songwriting credit. “I Take What I Want” is an uptempo romp that, although it didn’t chart, set the tone for the majority of Sam and Dave’s Stax singles. Next time out, Sam, Dave, Hayes, Porter, and everyone else at Stax would be celebrating.
1. However, in a year in which Billboard suspended publication of its R&B charts, it’s hard to precisely measure each record’s impact. Suffice it to say that none of the company’s releases that year managed to dent the pop Top 40.
2. This is a familiar trope in the lives of many of the first-period Stax artists. Due to the relative lack of black programming available on American airwaves until the late 1940s, a couple of generations of black musicians grew up imbued with the sounds of country music.
3. According to Isaac, one side of Johnny Rebel’s 45 was called “What Can You Give in Return,” and it was released on Pepper Records. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any trace of it.
4. Kirk and Gregory would later spend time with the Isaac Hayes Movement.
5. The Hayes-Porter productions were credited to U. G. Lee.
6. Many years later the record was rereleased with “C.C. Rider” substituted for “Sweet Temptations” as the B-side.
7. Jeb Stuart was a journeyman R&B singer who over time would record for a host of Memphis labels including Phillips, Bingo, and Youngstown. He kept this particular band together for quite a while, working the Southern Club for three or four months before moving over to the Continental Club and then to the TG Club. Hayes played on and helped arrange one of Stuart’s Phillips singles.
8. Over the next few years, Caple was in and out of Memphis and, on a number of occasions, played on additional Stax sessions.
9. Unfortunately, the Memphis Musicians Union has virtually no sessions sheets for sessions held before 1966. Curiously enough, Fantasy Records, which bought Stax in 1977, also has no sessions sheets pre-1966.
10. Including “Come to Me,” “Chained and Bound,” “Your One and Only Man,” “Mr. Pitiful,” and “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” a handful of newly recorded originals, and covers, Soul Ballads did not do as well as Pain in My Heart on the Top LP charts, only reaching the number 147 position. It did, though, make an appearance on Billboard’s new R&B LP chart, first appearing April 10 and seven weeks later peaking at number 3, staying on the chart for a total of fourteen weeks.
11. To the best of Duck Dunn’s recollection, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a cover of William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” and Otis’s searing version of B. B. King’s “Rock Me Baby” were cut during the second shift while Cooke’s “Shake” and “Wonderful World,” Solomon Burke’s “Down in the Valley,” the Temptations’ “My Girl,” the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and Redding’s own “Ole Man Trouble” and “Respect” were cut in the daytime.
12. In actuality Stax delivered 29 singles in 1965, 35 in 1966, and 49 in 1967, plus several dozen LP tracks.
13. As was, and still is among some companies, standard practice in the record industry. See footnote 22 on page 13 for more details.
14. The inscription on Stax Records that read “Distributed by Atlantic Recording Company” was, in essence, fraudulent.
15. Elton Whisenhunt, “Memphis Sound: A Southern View,” Billboard (June 12, 1965): 6.
16. “Don’t Fight It” reached the number 4 and number 53 spots on the R&B and pop charts, while “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do),” based on a gospel song by Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes, reached the number 13 and number 53 spots respectively.
17. Jerry Wexler also stresses that Stax was an anomaly in that he never saw drugs or alcohol being consumed on the premises at daytime sessions. It was simply understood that Jim Stewart forbade such activity. Various musicians point out that when Jim Stewart wasn’t at the studio late at night, it was a different story, and before Jim quit his day job at the bank, it wasn’t that uncommon for a quart or two of beer to be consumed in the studio. In general, though, in the 1960s, Stax was a pretty sober environment and consequently Pickett didn’t get out of hand.
18. In many ways, it is a shame that this policy was ever instituted. With Atlantic barred from the Stax studio, it turned to both Muscle Shoals and Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio. While undeniably great records were cut by Atlantic at both locations, it boggles the mind to imagine the MG’s working with Atlantic artists such as Aretha Franklin, King Curtis, and Clarence Carter.
19. Sam sang second tenor in most of these street-corner groups. Quite surprisingly, he didn’t sing lead until his late twenties, just a little before he met Dave Prater.
20. “Never Never” appeared on the ultra-rare Alston 777 while “My Love Belongs to You” was released on Marlin 6104.
21. All five plus the Marlin single were later issued by Roulette on LP to capitalize on the duo’s success at Stax.
22. It seems odd that the dynamic duo did not continue writing. According to Sam, at Roulette, Stax, and Atlantic, “We were just pawns. They knew what was good for us. The only thing we were allowed to do was sing. There was no sense in telling them that I could write ’cause who would have listened? We didn’t have no power or clout.”
23. The above account of “Little Lady Stone” was pieced together via interviews with Chips Moman, Isaac Hayes, David Porter, and Homer Banks. Although 1965 appears to be an accurate date for the record’s issue, the song itself was not registered with BMI until 1967.
24. In this period Hayes, as Ed Lee, also wrote by himself the A-side of a Mar-Keys single, “Banana Juice” (Stax 166).