6

“Wait, We Got Time for Another Kid”

The home of the Memphis blues had been another lure for African-Americans migrating from the Deep South. Sam Phillips’s work with Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, and Ike Turner carried over from the blues and jazz clubs along Beale Street in the inner-city west side, where W. C. Handy’s band had once played music he said came from “Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of the underprivileged but undaunted class.”¹ Memphis was bigger but not much different than Macon, under the yoke of Jim Crow. As early as 1866 there had been race riots in the city, and a century later, emotions were still simmering. In the early 1960s, the city closed the public swimming pool rather than obey a court order to integrate it.²

But it was white men who provided the connection between past and present, first the bombastic Sam Phillips, then the mild-mannered Union Planters Bank clerk Jim Stewart. Born in 1930, Stewart was a fiddler in a band called the Canyon Cowboys before founding Satellite Records in his garage in Middleton, Tennessee. He convinced his older sister, Estelle, to loan him $2,500 for an empty storefront in nearby Brunswick, and they became co-owners, welding rockabilly to rock and roll with bands like Fred Byler and the Tunetts, Donna Rae and the Sunbeams, and Don Willis and the Orbits. Making a few bucks, the Stewarts moved to the big town in 1961, converting the old Capitol Theater into an office/studio, and changing the company to Stax Records. The adjoining Satellite record store was operated by Estelle, one of two influential Tennessee women coincidentally named Axton at the time, the other Nashville’s Mae Boren Axton, who co-wrote “Heartbreak Hotel” for Elvis Presley.

Estelle’s son, Charles “Packy” Axton,” formed the label’s house band, originally called, of all things, the Royal Spades. Packy played sax, his guitarist was a tall, gangly guy named Steve Cropper, and his bassist was a squat fireplug with curly hair, Donald “Duck” Dunn. Stewart’s first house producer, Chips Moman, who had produced the first hits on Satellite, buffed his spare arrangements with the blazing horn section of Axton, Wayne Jackson, and Don Nix. Then, when Moman fell out with Stewart and quit, Cropper became de facto producer for almost all the songs recorded at Stax, with the same small, tight coterie of musicians.

The great Rufus Thomas was an important adjunct. Thomas was black radio in Memphis, as a member of one of the country’s first all-black DJ lineups, on WDIA. He also already had success at Sun Records and had hosted talent shows that broke out B. B. King, Ike Turner, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. In 1960, he did a duet on Satellite with his fifteen-year-old daughter Carla, called “’Cause I Love You,” and then produced her on “Gee Whiz.” Father and daughter became fixtures on the renamed Stax label, as Stewart chartered it on a parallel course with Berry Gordy’s black-owned Motown label, though Stewart lacked Gordy’s autocratic, vise-like grip on all matters in and out of the studio. For example, Motown artists were not even permitted to do, or see, their own tax returns; the company accountants did it for them.3 Nor did Gordy pay any mind to the inherent conflict of interest in managing the acts whose records he released—the same conflict that Bobby Smith had with Otis.

The beacon-like STAX sign quickly became a magnet for what was the core of a new, collegial Memphis music scene. “Being treated like an equal human being . . . was really a phenomenon,” says Al Bell, who came to the company in 1965 and later became executive vice president, then president. “The spirit that came from Jim and Estelle allowed all of us, black and white, to . . . come into the doors of Stax, where you had freedom, you had harmony, you had people working together.”⁴ Where Gordy built a strict producer-centric caste system in order to distill the blacker edges of blues-based music to expressly appeal to the white market, Stewart just let fly whatever came from the studio, where anyone could have a say in the production.

As a result, the sound coming from the studio was blacker than the famed, heavily formulaic “Motown sound,” and Stewart would pointedly append the “Soulsville” emblem to the Stax name. Still, Wayne Jackson notes that Stax “was not formed as a ‘black music’ label. That’s a fallacy. Jim wanted the best talent he could find in Memphis. We had all played in the clubs, where there were no racial barriers. I was sometimes the only white guy onstage, and sometimes Andrew Love, a great tenor sax player who came in after Packy Axton left, was the only black guy. The singers were black because they were the best, too, but the musicians were mainly white. The Royal Spades were all white.⁵

Not everyone in Memphis was as sure that Stewart had the interests of the underclass at heart. Years later, Stewart would recall that the city’s chapter of the NAACP “wanted to know who I was and what I was all about . . . what my intentions were and if black people would be treated as they should in the company [and] would they ever be in a capacity of management and have real power in the company.”6 Wexler, to be sure, saw how advantageous Stax could be as a talent feeder.

By 1962, with many of the original R&B-oriented labels in decline or gone, Atlantic faced a crossroads. Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, the co-founding brothers of the company, had written one of the unlikeliest but most impressive success stories in popular music. Once they were literally “young Turks” in the business. Born in Istanbul, they had emigrated as teenagers in 1935 when their father was named Turkey’s ambassador to the U.S. In 1947 they founded Atlantic, primarily as a jazz label, having become smitten with black musical idioms while living in Washington, D.C. However, as vital as they were to the transition of rhythm and blues to rock and roll, the toothy siblings—the bald, jive-talking Ahmet a purebred attention-getter with hip pronouncements basted in a nearly indecipherable accent, while the shaggy-haired Nesuhi remained in the shadows—their traditional tastes relied greatly on heavyweights like Ray Charles and Bobby Darin. In danger, however, of being curators instead of creators, it fell to the grizzled Jerry Wexler to reinvent the company as a funnel of new voices. A former Billboard reporter, Wexler had coined the term “rhythm and blues” for the new genus of blues in the 1950s. But now that term was passé, and the era of LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee” and Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” which had helped build Atlantic into a player, was long since over.

As in the changing tide of politics, it was obvious that the future of music belonged to a new generation. Indeed, when a new president, the first born in the twentieth century, took office in 1960 speaking of an incipient “New Frontier,” he meant a metaphoric landscape of ideas, open to those previously ignored. JFK’s prescience could have, of course, also been applied to the culture of young black singers who, having seen the successes and exploitations of the previous generation of black talent, were about to take over, with newer, more meaningful modes of expression. They had to come from somewhere. Like, say, Macon, Georgia.

•

THE THREE-MAN party from Macon arrived in Memphis on February 9. Instead of checking in at a hotel they went straight to the Stax office on East McLemore Street. Parking outside, Otis carried all the luggage into the old theater, leading everyone into the drafty studio, believing he was only there as a drudge, not a performer. After Galkin was taken to see Jim Stewart, and introduced him to Johnny, Otis, with nothing to do, leaned his back against a studio wall, crossed his arms, and waited as the musicians began to set up. These were the men who played on nearly every single Stax session, an updated Mar-Keys that included Booker T. Jones on the organ and drummer Al Jackson Jr., Jones being a child prodigy who was still only eighteen at the time and not yet out of high school. Now, with Cropper’s writing and production skills evidenced by the breakout success of “Green Onions,” even with Stewart’s communal-minded directive that had all members of the band share the writing credit for the song, the elongated guitar player was the de facto leader of nearly all sessions, though it was Booker T. whose name defined the MG’s.

A common memory among them through the years was that the first time they set eyes on Otis Redding, he was a dominating figure but only because of his size. Cropper, who was standing on the curb when the car pulled up, believed he was “like six foot six,” as he watched Otis unfold from the station wagon and go around to the trunk and begin removing musical equipment. He had taken out Jenkins’s guitar and a couple of microphones when the elongated Cropper walked over.

“Hey, man,” he said. “You know, we’re not gonna need these microphones. We got our own microphones.”

“Well, I’m gonna bring our stuff in anyway,” Redding told him.

Shrugging, Cropper continued watching him lug the gear into the building, convinced the overgrown young man was only there as Jenkins’s driver—or, as Cropper says with a laugh, “A val-et,” drawing out the word playfully. “In those days, that’s what they called a driver.”7

Floyd Newman, the sax man and longtime habitué on the Memphis club scene, has particularly vivid memories of Otis that day. Newman, who had provided the indelible spoken intro on “Last Night,” cooing seductively “Ooh-ooooh, last night,” did not play on the session, but pulls from his memory an image of Redding clad in “a white suit, a hospital suit. I believe he was working in a hospital in Macon and went right from that job and came up here.”⁸ Newman also swears that Phil Walden was there with him that day, which only proves how unreliable the mind can be when reaching back in time. To be sure, Walden was nowhere to be seen as the band was given sheet music by Jenkins, and then played two songs behind his lead guitar, instrumentals named “Spunky” and “Bashful Guitar.” Wexler’s two thousand dollars had bought a full three hours of studio time, as Galkin wanted a big enough window for both Jenkins and Redding to sing. But Galkin began to get a little nervous when Jenkins’s discomfort recording with strangers drew out the time and prompted numerous retakes.

As the clock ticked, the musicians went through continual adjustments and meetings in the control room, where Stewart sat at the mixing board, getting frustrated. Galkin was, too, and kept checking his watch. Otis, as well, was getting antsy. Having been coached by Phil Walden to get himself some time, he took to bugging Al Jackson between takes. As Otis remembered the scene years after, “I asked if I could record [‘These Arms of Mine’]. The musicians had been working with Johnny all day, and they didn’t have but twenty minutes before they went home.”⁹ According to Jackson, it finally happened because he had been asked so many times by Otis that he just wanted to shut him up. “Hey, there’s a guy here with Johnny, and he’s been after me all day long about wanting to hear him sing,” Jackson said to Cropper. “Could you take five minutes to listen to this guy sing?”10

•

IT WASN’T Cropper’s call, of course, and at around six o’clock, with forty minutes left to the session, much to Galkin’s relief, Stewart, more in frustration than anything, decreed, “Okay, it’s good,” meaning, wrap it up.¹¹ Jenkins had his two songs in the can. The band started to scatter. According to Jenkins, he should have gotten credit for getting Otis in front of the microphone. He swore he went over to Stewart and said, “Hey, why not let Otis use the rest of my time?” Fanciful as that tale is, it was Galkin, sitting behind Stewart behind the glass, who got it done.

“Wait,” he said, “we got time for another kid.”

“What kid?”

“The other kid out there. He’s a singer.”

Galkin, a man Jerry Wexler called “an irresistible pain in the ass,” pointed out, in his cloying way, that he had paid for the time and fibbed that Jerry Wexler had only fronted the dough if both kids got to sing.”

“Nobody told me,” Stewart repeated.

“I thought Jerry told you.”

“Jerry doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Look, are we gonna sit here or are we gonna get this kid in front of a microphone?”

“What’s the song?”

Joey had no idea. “Otis,” he called to Redding, who was starting to pack up Jenkins’s gear, “the big man wants to hear you sing. What you got?”

Newman’s version was that the man he believed to be Phil Walden, who was actually most likely Galkin, turned to Redding as the room was emptying and said, “Otis, you wanna try one song?”

Redding, perhaps not completely surprised, indeed had a song, though not, as Redding would later recall, “These Arms of Mine,” but one he had written in Bobby Smith’s office, a blues rocker called “Hey Hey Baby.” Stewart had him hum a few bars, then called through the intercom, “One more, guys.”

By then, Duck Dunn had split; hearing Otis vamp the song, he was unimpressed, as were the other session men. Booker T. and some of the others were outside the door. Lewie Steinberg was on the premises and was asked to play bass. Whoever else was still around sat down—and if you talk to Booker T. today, he will say he was one of them. However, in Steve Cropper’s memory, “Booker had already left for the day, so I sat down at the piano, which I play only a little for writing.”

“What key?” Cropper asked.

“It don’t matter,” Otis replied.12

When recording “Hey Hey Baby,” he tried to sing in a more mature, slightly lower register, though once again his voice became strained on the fadeout. Johnny would recall that “his timing was bad. So I stayed there with him, got it right down pat, enough for them to record something.”¹³ Indeed, the most compelling element of the tune was a hot-lick solo by Jenkins.

Stewart was not overly impressed. “The world’s not waiting for another Little Richard,” he said. Stewart, however, was impressed by the voice he had heard. “You got another one?” he asked Redding. He did, though he might have been a little sheepish about singing it, as “These Arms of Mine” was not only on the market, performed by Buddy Leach and the Playboys, but also on Otis’s demo record sitting in Smith’s office. Knowing it was his strongest song, he would sing it again, for Stewart, and when he did, the Stax president was stunned by the unabashed rawness and measured nuance of his voice, little of which had been heard during the first song. As Cropper recalls, “Man, my hair stood on end. Jim came running out and said, ‘That’s it! That’s it! Where is everybody? We gotta get this on tape!’ So I grabbed all the musicians who hadn’t left already for their night gigs, and we recorded it right there.”

Redding had only one directive for the band. “Just gimme those church things,” Cropper remembers Otis telling him, meaning quick three-note repetitions on the piano, or triplets, which Cropper would play throughout. The song was, in musician-speak, a 6/8 time signature, a slow, romantic groove caressed by the drum beat. Eschewing any instrumental intro, Stewart had him sing the first few bars sonically naked, accompanied only by silent air and a thick echo. And that vocal stirred some heavy gravy as he began, chucking Little Richard for something deep, something that seemed to make the words quake. “These arms of-a mine, they are lonely. Lonely and feeling blue,” he began, letting them roll out of his mouth slowly, sinuously. The song’s simple lyrics needed no real embellishment other than the remarkably mature nuances he gave them, with a quiver and colloquial accents—high-emotion words drawn out as “yearning-ah” or “wanting-ah.”

At the dramatic peak, he sang so softly that it sounded more like he was purring, or even speaking, not quite a prototypical rap. The band came in with a basic rock arrangement, Cropper’s triplets stamped by Jackson’s metronomic snare and cymbal, and Jenkins added neat little twiddle flourishes. It was by no means a new sound. Clearly derivative of the 1959 Brook Benton R&B ballad “It’s Just a Matter of Time,” it was the voice that carried every inch of it. Stewart would recall that no one there “jumped up and down and said we’ve discovered a superstar.” He did think the song was “different” but that “we were all tired and bummed out.” He announced, “Okay, it’s good” and that was that.14

Cropper however tells it differently, indicating that Stewart was putting on his diffidence so as not to tip his hand. “When you hear something that’s better than anything you ever heard, you know it, and it was unanimous. We almost wore out the tape playing it afterward.” Cropper himself says, “I’d never heard anything like that before.” Booker T., possibly from imagination, adds, “It didn’t seem like an audition at all. It was a performance. It wasn’t the size of his voice, we knew lots of people with vocal powers like that. It was the intent with which he sang. He was all emotion.” He can even recall that Redding had sung the song in B-flat.

Stewart then took Galkin aside to talk shop. Twenty minutes later, they emerged, with papers for both Johnny Jenkins and Otis Redding to sign. They both scribbled their names, and the lights of the studio were turned out. It had been an eventful three hours, even if neither Otis nor Johnny knew the half of it.

•

BOTH CAME away from Memphis believing that neither of them should hold their breath. They talked about upcoming Pinetopper gigs. Joey Galkin turned his attention to other young talent he made notes to go see perform in the clubs. Both Galkin and Phil Walden, who had been apprised of the double session, took a wait and see approach. And Bobby Smith, with Otis back home, made plans to take him into the studio to record “These Arms of Mine,” blissfully unaware that Otis had sung the song at Stax. In fact, nothing much happened for several weeks. Then Smith got a call from his friend John R., the Nashville DJ, who told him he’d been to an industry convention in St. Louis and seen Joe Galkin making the rounds playing a tape of Redding’s “These Arms of Mine” for radio station people. The song, he said, was about to be released by Stax, and Galkin was already plugging it. John R., who knew the song from the Buddy Leach version, wondered if Smith knew about it. Smith was dumbfounded. John had some advice. “Better check your contract,” he said, meaning the one Smith had with Otis Redding.15

Actually, he needed to check the contracts Otis and Joe Galkin had already signed with Jim Stewart in Memphis, which had opened the way for him to release “These Arms of Mine” as a single. Stewart, hedging his bet on Redding a bit, put out the song, backed with “Hey Hey Baby,” on his sub-label, Volt, which had been created as a way to get around the policy that radio stations had begun to implement of not playing too many songs from any one label, as a way to avoid payola allegations. Otis had been told only days before, when Phil Walden broke the news to him, that he had signed a Stax recording contract, which would run for three years with two two-year options, at the standard royalty of three and a half cents per record sold. Since he had just turned twenty-one when he signed, it was legal and binding.

It was all too obvious why Galkin had not told Smith: It was pure larceny. Apparently Joe hoped that, once it was all out in the open, Smith would simply hand over Otis to the big boys at Stax and Atlantic, groveling for a chance to get future Orbit records into the Atlantic distribution line. Smith, however, wasn’t quite so easily shoved aside. When he recovered from the shock, the first thing he did was to call Otis and ask him how it had happened. Otis, as naive as a man could be, stammered that he thought Stewart had merely wanted to get him on tape and was never told a record was coming out of it.

That was true enough, and of course Smith had not been averse to Otis going to Memphis—quite the contrary. He may have even been okay with “These Arms of Mine” being a one-off record for Stax, to get Otis some well-connected exposure. However, it had all been done in secret, and not only did he believe Stewart had breached Otis’s contract with Smith, he also believed that he had undercut a record Smith had out on the market. Nor did Smith know something else, even more insidious, about Joe Galkin posing as Otis’s manager in Memphis. Indeed, that little flim-flam prompted Phil Walden, home on furlough, to suddenly hop to it and officially sign Otis to a three-year personal management contract. Walden stuck a paper in front of Otis—yet another page in what was now an endless stream of them—who again signed, and again legally.

Walden wasted no time taking a meeting with Galkin, to whom he was appreciative and who still had a lot of leverage. The two men, again, with not a word of input from the subject of their business, agreed on a fifty-fifty split of publishing royalties on all present and future Redding songs—actually, a fifty-fifty split of the half-ownership of those rights Galkin already owned. That worked out to a quarter cut each of the publishing for Galkin and Walden, half for Jim Stewart. Nothing for Otis Redding. Galkin, a sort of shadow co-manager, would also receive 30 percent of Redding’s record sales, in perpetuity.

Smith, still figuring he was Otis’s manager and employer, called Stewart, who was curt, saying that Redding was underage and Smith had no case. Feeling like he’d been kicked in the groin, and certain that Otis’s contract was legal, Smith next rang up Galkin, who felt no need for soft soap. “Yeah,” he told Smith, “I went ahead and recorded him. He wasn’t twenty-one when he signed your contract.”16 The only way Galkin could have known that was if he had actually seen the contract; but if he did, he might have seen Fannie Mae Redding’s signature on it, obviating the underage claim. Instead, it seemed he had merely asked Otis when he had signed the contract, and merely assumed he had signed it alone, when he was underage. Either way, Smith figured he very much had a case. He told Galkin, “You won’t get away with this.” Then he hired a lawyer, who immediately bore in on Galkin, getting him to admit he had been after Otis from the start.¹⁷ But Jim Stewart’s lawyers—big-time New York attorneys who represented Atlantic—would be able to drag any lawsuit on and bleed Smith dry before the case was ever adjudicated. Reluctantly, Smith’s lawyer advised him to come to a settlement. The most Stewart would ante was seven hundred dollars, for the retroactive mechanical rights to “These Arms of Mine.” Smith, already tired of wrangling, took it, but under a false impression.

“Bobby thought he was only selling ‘These Arms of Mine,’ that Otis would still be on Orbit, and Bobby was still his manager,” says Wheeler, with a sad shake of the head. “Listen, I loved Bobby Smith. He was a good old boy and here he was up against Atlantic Records. Bobby had one eye and had to put a paper right up to his head to read it, but small print he couldn’t read. And what happened was, he got hoodwinked, real bad. He thought he was makin’ a deal and wound up signing over everything. And Bobby never got over it. He didn’t blame Otis and not even Galkin. He blamed Phil Walden, who he thought had planned to screw him over. They were good friends, Phil did booking for Confederate, but it was like Cain and Abel. Bobby Smith, he held a grudge against Phil Walden until the day he died.”18

Jerry Wexler was also cheesed off. His two-thousand-dollar seed money had gotten him a minor hit to distribute but, more importantly, a talent to be reckoned with. But, now, he wished he had Redding directly on the label. “If things had gone according to Hoyle,” he said years later in his authorized biography, Rhythm & Blues: A Life in American Music, “Otis would have been signed to Atlantic; we had, after all, financed his first session. But Jim Stewart wanted him on Stax, and our arrangement was working so well that I let it pass. . . . Had I stuck to business-only principles, he would have been Atlantic’s first international star of the sixties.”¹⁹

If anyone had told that to Otis Redding at the time, he would have been the one who laughed loudest.