By mid-decade, Stax/Volt was a consistent hit factory, though mainly on the R&B charts. Rufus Thomas’s seminally funk-tastic “Walking the Dog” however went to number 10 pop, number 1 R&B, in 1963 and was covered by the young Rolling Stones in ’64. The Mar-Keys, Booker T. and the MG’s, and Carla Thomas had lower-ranked hits. But Otis Redding had virtually taken over the place, and his sound drove its “anti-Motown” idiom with unapologetically Southern soul. Jerry Wexler was so enamored of the Stax sound that he craved an Otis Redding of his own. That became Wilson Pickett, the same sort of rasp-voiced wailer who had been promoted from the Falcons and recorded for Atlantic, produced by the wondrous Tom Dowd. But they were missing that certain something and Wexler took Pickett to Stax, where Jim Stewart was beginning to get proprietary about his studio, loath to allow anyone who was not on his roster to use it, even his musicians. Wexler, though, was owed a favor and on May 12, 1965, Pickett recorded the milestone soul hit “In the Midnight Hour,” which became a million seller.
Pickett, however, chafed, believing that Steve Cropper had appropriated a writer’s credit on the song without due cause. Indeed, it had happened in precisely the same way in which Otis and Cropper had collaborated on “Mr. Pitiful,” at the Lorraine Motel. “Wicked Wilson Pickett,” a snappish hornet of a man, never thought much of the musicians in Memphis and could get nasty when he drank, which he had to do on the sly given Stewart’s house rule against imbibing during daytime sessions—so adamant was he that Cropper once said, “I don’t know if there was a joint ever lit up in that place.”1 But Pickett never kept his mouth in check. As Floyd Newman says, “I never heard a man use words like that in my life, and I been around the block a few times.”2
By year’s end, Pickett was so distrustful of Stax that he vowed never again to record in that studio. He needn’t have worried though. The musicians so detested him they sent word to Stewart not to bring “that asshole” into the studio again.3 Stewart, too, had had it with Pickett, and any other non-Stax artist wanting to use the studio. Even with his tap into royalties on Pickett songs (another would be “634-5789 (Soulsville U.S.A.),” released a year later, a number 13 pop, number 1 R&B song, co-written with Cropper and Eddie Floyd), Stewart denied access to outsiders. Wexler, griping about ingratitude, took Pickett to FAME Studios, the first of the two great soul shops in the backwoods of northeast Alabama, in the generally obscure town of Muscle Shoals, where more great soul may have been made, per capita, than in any other studio in the land. (In 1969, another Muscle Shoals shop would spin off, led by the FAME house band guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist David Hood, keyboardist Barry Beckett, and drummer Roger Hawkins; though it used the name of the by-then-legendary city, that new studio was not actually in Muscle Shoals but two miles to the north in Sheffield.)
At FAME, Pickett recorded some of his biggest hits, including his covers of “Land of 1,000 Dances,” “Mustang Sally,” and “Funky Broadway,” all million sellers, none enriching Stewart. Atlantic also set up its own shop in Memphis, American Studios, sending Tom Dowd to build the studio to his specifications, foreshadowing a coming split with Stax. Still, Stewart could be content that, of the two big soul soloists, he had Redding. Because while Pickett was a truly superb singer, and had more crossover hits than did Redding, no one, not even Wexler, could claim that he was cut from the same cloth. Pickett, in fact, can be said to be Redding’s hard-rocking, soul-stomping side, while Percy Sledge, who would enter the Atlantic picture in 1966, was Redding’s (slightly) softer, (slightly) more sentimental side. Pickett may well have been the most commercially successful, and his records, as Wexler said, “were terrific, and strong examples of the Southern school of recording.” Yet, when Wexler had to make a judgment of which singer was the best of that breed, he was clear. “Some argue that distinction belongs to another singer, who, like Ray Charles before him, was himself a producer. I’m talking about Otis Redding.”4
•
JIM STEWART, a most conservative and peculiar man, was not convinced that the middling earnings on his product would ever grow sufficiently for him to be able to quit his job at the bank. By 1965, though, he finally summoned the nerve to do it and, protecting his hard-won turf, he was almost maniacally inclined. Neither was he above exercising a few double standards. While on the one hand he prohibited Wilson Pickett from using his studio, he had no objection loaning out his peerless musicians to record for Atlantic sessions in Muscle Shoals and New York. In those shops, which had magic of their own in the walls, Wayne Jackson, Andrew Love, and Floyd Newman could earn higher wages with their horns as visiting players. Newman in particular was ecstatic to be able to play with his idol and beau ideal, King Curtis, in New York.
Another step forward for the Stax musicians was when two instrumentals, “Frog Stomp” and “Sassy,” were released in 1963 under Floyd Newman’s name. While Gordy would do the same for pianist Earl Van Dyke a year later on the instrumental “Soul Stomp,” he kept his house band anonymous so as not to give them leverage. Stewart, by contrast, freely printed the names of session musicians on Stax album jackets. Neither did Stewart give a hang about spreading Soulsville to the masses in ways Gordy wasn’t with Motown. As such, the competition between Stax and Motown was every bit a contrast. Between Detroit and Memphis; between Otis Redding and Smokey Robinson, the two best soul singers who ever lived. Indeed, Smokey’s pipes were as dewy and fluttery as Redding’s were scabrous and growling. Not that Otis couldn’t make female hearts flutter, as well, biting into a romantic ballad. But Smokey was big-city cool, Redding sweaty, Deep South church pulpit hot. Gordy—who, unlike Stewart, craved publicity and, again unlike Stewart, got a ton of it—decreed that Motown songs had soul, but after the early years of rough-hewn R&B, knowing he had that market in his pocket, he aimed for white audiences with a white-glove approach. His girl groups were sent to charm school, balancing books on their head, and the target venues were big hotels and swank nightclubs like the Copacabana in New York (where James Brown and Sam Cooke also famously headlined). The Motown “4/4,” or “four on the floor” tempo, with a drum and at times a guitar hitting on every beat, was known to music men as a “white beat,” as white audiences tended to clap on every beat, while black audiences liked to clap on every other beat. Motown sessions were massive, Stax’s intimate. Redding once delineated the two soul nerve centers this way: “Motown does a lot of overdubbing. It’s mechanically done. At Stax the rule is: whatever you feel, play it. We cut everything together—horns, rhythm, and vocal. We’ll do it three or four times, go back and listen to the results and pick the best one.”5 Rufus Thomas, who died at eighty-four in 2011 after a glorious and very well-lived life, once put it in characteristically Rufus terms: “Motown had the sweet, but Stax had the funk.”6
Actually, Motown had plenty of funk, too, but each camp tended to dismiss the other in some way. Al Bell, the influential DJ, gilds the lily in saying of Stax that “it was the only label in America that had a bottom, a big, fat bottom bass sound. It was like a snake charmer, it mesmerized me, it shook my bones.”7 That unfairly ignores the legendary Motown bottom constructed by the greatest bass player who ever lived, James Jamerson. But Stax people liked to boast of the regional purity in its sound, which was created in multiracial common cause of its musicians. Even though Motown, too, had biracial musicians in its ranks who could play a hell of an R&B groove.
The flip side for Stewart was that, if anything, he was more sexist than the notoriously so Gordy, never believing that women could sing soul as well as men could. Stax would only fleetingly try the girl group thing. In 1964, there were one-off records by acts called Cheryll and Pam, and Barbara and the Browns, as well as several by singers Wendy Rene and Barbara Stephens—but the quota of female artists was pretty much filled by Carla Thomas. Nor were background singers often used, a given at Motown but to Stewart an encroachment on the star’s territory—or, as Booker T. Jones believed, Stewart was too cheap to pay for them.8 He also and actively sought songs written by the artists themselves. While Motown’s creative hierarchy was ruled by staff writers/producers, Stewart didn’t even identify a producer on any record until 1967, usually leaving the credit to read “Produced by Stax Staff,” which could include anyone on the studio floor. Stax writers worked in collaboration with the artists. This was one reason that so few Stax songs were covered by other labels during the decade; as rooted to a given act as any Stax recording was, little room was left for interpretation, as Jerry Butler determined in regard to Otis Redding (although there would be one glaring exception, as Otis would soon learn).
The “other” Otis of sixties soul, Otis Williams, founder of the Temptations and sole surviving member of the iconic group fronted by David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, still has just the slightest trace of geographical chauvinism in his mellow voice when he observes, “Stax definitely had that Southern feel. You hear a Stax record and you immediately think ‘the South.’ I was born in Texarkana, man, I grew up with those blues. But Motown had a much broader appeal. Not that we didn’t get into the horns, too. Motown was trying to copy Stax to an extent. Stax laid it on full force, it was very exciting, but it wasn’t geared to a crossover market like us.”
Williams has cause to preen; the Temptations had one huge hit after another in the ’60s, the lushly soulful “My Girl” in 1965 their first number one hit, both pop and R&B. But he maintains the rivalry between the labels was a friendly one. “Oh yeah, we played dates with Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd—but not with Otis. He didn’t need anyone to help him sell tickets. We would run across Otis from time to time. You couldn’t have met a nicer guy. He admired us and we admired him, and when he did ‘My Girl’ [on Otis Blue], we couldn’t help but take it as a compliment. He did it in his . . . fashionable way. It was wonderful to hear him do it. But we had no real desire to cover Stax songs. We would cover the Beatles because everybody was covering the Beatles, Otis too. But I guess Stax felt they needed to cover our stuff.”9
•
TO BE sure, Phil Walden did not care to position Otis Redding as a Vegas lounge act, or need to teach him charm. He clearly was not middle-of-the-road fare, not yet. All soul acts were to some degree sexual but Redding’s stage act screamed it. From his mouth, “Respect” was a euphemism—hell, laying down a man’s gender-given right—for sex. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” reached its virtual climax with a repetition of “I loved you once, I loved you twice . . .,” all the way up to “ten times,” at which point the unbearable delay of the climax reached its end. The overt nature of sex and a man’s right to it, even when he was apologizing, in nearly every Stax record kept some doors closed to artists like Redding.
While the Temptations, Supremes, and Four Tops made plenty of TV appearances—regularly on Ed Sullivan, the teen-oriented Shindig! and Hullabaloo, and two Supremes-Temptations network specials—Otis’s TV shots were sporadic. Reflective of the Stax “regional” status and the fact that such shows justifiably booked acts with hit mainstream records, Otis mainly performed on local dance-party shows like Shivaree, Shebang, 9th Street West, and The Lloyd Thaxton Show, the only real national exposure coming on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, moved to Saturday mornings, and his after-school show Where the Action Is. The Sullivan show, like an engagement at the Copa, was still waiting when he died.
Although in 1965 Jim Stewart would reach into the rival camp and hire Al Abrams, a great promotions man who had helped Motown get off the ground, the blacker nature of Stax made its artists a tougher sell when it came to appearances on the tube. For all Redding’s years as a soul potentate, American audiences had to make a sincere effort to seek out Stax/Volt records in stores to find him. To make matters even more difficult, only five times would they ever find an album by him—reflecting Stewart’s aversion to the marketability of albums, which the company only put out forty-two of until 1968. Motown, meanwhile, obsessively packaged and repackaged its product, releasing hundreds, sometimes three a year by the Supremes or the Temptations. The irony was that Redding’s well-thought-out albums had presaged a growing nature of the 33-rpm record as the best way to hear out an act in full context, sampling the range and nuances.
Redding especially stropped the trend, his huge sales numbers almost entirely from slow but steady album purchases, which of course has remained the case since his death. But even his single releases would linger, on both charts, sitting there to be discovered by the next wave of buyers who heard of him through the grapevine, stoking curiosity. Though Otis Blue never rose above number 75 on the pop album chart, it remained in the top 100 for 34 weeks, longer than some that had gone top 10. Most of his records accrued sales of around a quarter-million copies, as his fan base kept expanding. In the record business, this is a far more preferable, and profitable, path than a top 10 “rabbit” that burns out and quickly fades away. The work also did something else. In an inversion to the assumed order of things then, it was he who legitimized the new rock movement, and one band in particular. As a story in the English music paper Record Mirror enthused, “Final R&B acceptance for the STONES? (Yes, Otis has recorded ‘Satisfaction.’)”10
•
WHILE IT would have pleased Stewart and Atlantic to no end if one of those slow and steady records kept on running into the top 10, no one at Stax tried to nudge him to make a consciously compromised crossover record, for fear of ruining a good thing. By ’65, when he was certified in his niche by being voted the top R&B male vocalist in a Cash Box reader poll, his singles were regarded as tidbits, teasers for his current or next album and show. The following single after “Respect” wasn’t the logical choice, “Satisfaction,” but rather the product of the next Redding session, on November 5, 1965, when he cut “Can’t Turn You Loose” and “Just One More Day,” two more titles in the litany of psychiatrist-couch ruminations about his life that he could best say in song—though he himself downplayed the titles and lyrics as mere fodder. When Alan Walden once wondered if he needed more thematic variety, Otis told him, sternly, “You worry about the damn lyrics; I’m gonna worry about settin’ the groove,” his belief being that people who listened to his songs barely heard the lyrics.11
This clearly was his way of insulating his gut-level feelings, no doubt allowing him to plumb them even more. “Just One More Day,” unwound like a tortured James Brown song with the same sort of searingly vulnerable concession as in “Respect,” vowing to do, say, and buy “anything” to be able to “cherish” his woman.
The song, co-written with Steve Cropper and Memphis saxophonist McElvoy Robinson, hit so hard that it was chosen as Redding’s next single. But it was “I Can’t Turn You Loose” that etched what would be the single most identifiable riff of the sixties’ soul idiom, the undulating roller-coaster ride of horn flourishes that escort him through breakneck attestations of . . . something, though the words were truly so secondary that they really were immaterial. There was also more than a little thievery, something Jim Stewart was clearly not averse to. Cropper, looking for an arrangement with the energy of the vocal, came up with something for his guitar that was very, very close to the opening bars and entire driving bass line of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” which came out in April 1965 and roared to the top of the pop and soul charts.
Cropper described the melody line as “just a riff I’d used on a few songs with the MG’s. Otis worked it up with the horns in about 10 minutes as the last thing we did one night in the studio. Just a riff and one verse that he sings over and over. That’s all it is.” And yet Cropper wasn’t so blithe when the record was issued with only one writer’s credit—Otis Redding. Given that Wilson Pickett accused Cropper of stealing such credits from him, and Floyd Newman’s contention about Jim Stewart gaming the process so that Cropper would be given credit as a rule, Cropper felt jobbed enough to go to Stewart, who said his name would be added in future pressings but, without explanation, not on album cuts of the song, where the bulk of Redding’s sales were generated.12 Indeed, this wouldn’t be the half of it; at the time, no one could have prefigured the endless album rereleases and repackaging of Redding material. It was similar to the fast one Stewart had pulled with the reparations to Allen Toussaint for “Pain in My Heart” by neglecting him in England. Nor would it be the last time he would need to make reparations to other writers.
Such was the life of a label owner in charge of doling out lucrative royalty credits. Angles were made to be played, chances taken, rules remade, people screwed. Indeed, Cropper can look all day now for a vintage copy of “Turn You Loose” with his name on it, and not be able to find one. However, because it was common, such matters did not disrupt the personal relationships within the industry. Cropper was about as tight with Stewart and Redding as a man could be, and remained so. And Stewart was always regarded as a man who would do just about anything for his stable, even if just a little bit more for himself.
Still, the fact that Stewart avoided a copyright infringement suit from Motown regarding the song was as impressive as the song itself, though it probably helped that he played it cool, releasing as the A-side “Just One More Day” first. After it got to number 15 R&B and 85 pop, “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” which the DJs had already been playing, broke out and galloped to number 11 R&B early in 1966, fusing almost at once into the new centerpiece of Redding’s stage show, which had been honed to a fine art and was really what animated him. As Booker T. Jones put it, offstage, “Otis was more distracted, not sure of himself. He couldn’t make the same movements in the studio when he sang. He was more restricted.” That stiffness, though, always melted in time. Onstage, he came on molten, dripping with sexual animalism. “He would do that thing where he stomped the left foot, then the right. And we all played with more intensity around him. He had that magnetism—‘I’m a man!’—and he knew it, too.”13
As if proving that hits seemed to matter less with Redding than perhaps any other soul artist, he was in constant demand, playing around twenty-five shows a month that kept him away from home, apart from the two children who were beginning to get used to him not being there, and further ate at the very relationship with Zelma he was begging in song to maintain. All this was a pretty price to pay for the halting success of his records. Indeed, his next two singles, “My Girl” and “A Change Is Gonna Come,” failed to make even the R&B chart. Stax in mid-1966 finally released “Satisfaction,” which didn’t suffer the same fate, going to number 4 R&B, 31 pop. With the hit, Otis Redding’s traveling show became so big that when Stax had put together a caravan of the label’s acts late in 1964—taking a page from Motown, it was billed as the “Stax Revue”—and booked a heavily promoted show in L.A., Stewart did not, could not, object that Otis passed up the tour rather than disrupt his own endless touring. The last time he had done so was back in ’63, when the Revue came to Macon. With Wilson Pickett, Carla and Rufus Thomas, Booker T. and the MG’s, the Mad Lads, and a couple of lesser acts, Stewart had more than enough to sell out and make important headlines. But it was settled law now that Otis Redding, unlike any of the other acts, could do all that and make all the money, all by himself, with high pop chartings superfluous. It ran counter to every rule known to the industry, and the wonder of it was that he was the only one who could pull it off.
•
AS STAX’S share of the soul pie was fattening, it was clear that Berry Gordy had some serious competition, but also that Jim Stewart and Gordy were in a kind of symbiotic, mutually beneficial alliance. As an interrelated musical idiom, Stax/Volt and Motown were both after the same thing, which Gordy had codified early on with one of his first Motown hits—“Money (That’s What I Want).” Gordy was undoubtedly better at earning it, by miles, building a more self-reliant business model. But in the ether above dollars and cents, together the soul labels did nothing less than prop up American music when, in the wake of the Beatles’ great leap forward, came an immediate shakeup. No longer did Broadway’s hoary power structure of song publishers and producers—who had actually been responsible for some damn good early-to-mid-’60s soul, such as the Drifters, J. J. Jackson’s “It’s All Right,” the Corsairs’ “Smoky Places,” Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now,” and Garnett Mimms’s magnificent “Cry Baby”—seem to matter.
As the white pop of the early 1960s began to seem increasingly passé, the recasting of the music culture gave black singers and musicians such a loyal and rabid following of their own—and one so different from the British Invasion acts—that it was resistant to skinny, pale English lads in tight suits, pointy-toed boots, and cereal bowl hairdos. According to the Billboard pop charts, there had been only two black acts among the top 30 songs in 1963, Stevie Wonder and the Impressions. In ’64, that jumped to six (excluding Louis Armstrong’s novelty show tune “Hello, Dolly!”): Mary Wells, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, the Raelettes, the Drifters, and the Dixie Cups. In ’65, it was eight, and never to fall below five again.14 This, too, was pungent irony, since groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones owed their eyeteeth to black artists from Muddy Waters to Motown.
Now, the Motown/Memphis niche, emulated by a number of black-oriented labels, entrenched but new enough to be fresh, was the only real alternative to the Brits. Indeed, soon black artists engaged in a reverse invasion, touring England and other European countries. The Stones revived men like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, the Yardbirds Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf, by not only covering their songs but sharing stages with them so they could enjoy a last ray of sun for their work. But within the new generation of rock, contemporary black singers like James Brown took the old masters to a higher level of truth and hellfire. And Otis Redding seemed to be the apostle of the new gospel called soul.
THIS RIVALRY of racial “frenemies” played out against a tableau of hard-fought racial progress, something that was late in coming to Macon. Martin Luther King Jr., who was born in Atlanta, led protests in Albany, Georgia, in the early ’60s during a time when twelve hundred blacks were jailed for marching in the street and organizing boycotts against segregated businesses in Savannah, Brunswick, and Rome. In Atlanta, which claimed to be “the city too busy to hate,” the Ku Klux Klan flourished. Indeed, at least 103 Southern cities desegregated their lunch counters before Atlanta. Up in Macon, there was unrest, too, including a 1963 bus boycott, but with little impact or notice. Dennis Wheeler found out that racism was alive and well in town. He remembers cops turning a bus of civil rights workers back at the city line. Wheeler himself participated in a sit-in at Woolworth’s downtown, when, he says, “Me and a bunch of my friends, black and white, sat down at the lunch counter. We were expecting a big incident, maybe get arrested, but they didn’t blink, they just served us. Nobody wanted any trouble. Jim Crow was there but it was like, let’s just keep things cool.”15
Elsewhere, things were far worse, and grim news would be seen and heard on the news in Macon. But for Redding, the closest he came to seeing violent racial unrest was when he became the innocent catalyst in a near-riot. Both times it happened, crazily enough, during the annual homecoming concerts at the Macon City Auditorium in 1966. On July 17, as a sold-out house of seven thousand was watching the show, a white cop named C. C. Dorough, meandered through the hall and found a black man in the basement illegally selling liquor. When he slapped the cuffs on the man, said the cop later, he was “jumped by a gang of Negroes.” Dorough said he was thrown to the floor, beaten, and disarmed, and the assailants clambered up the stairs. He called for backup and the exits to the auditorium were sealed, causing panicked spectators to bang on the doors and confront cops, who began to arrest people. The next day, UPI reported on the incident, with the Macon Telegraph running a story headlined 50 NEGROES IN MACON, GA., ARE ARRESTED IN MELEE,16 the exact headline that also ran in the New York Times a day later.
A bigger impact on Otis was made by what he saw with his own eyes on the road, when the realities of Jim Crow clashed with the serendipitous vibe of his stage act. “Otis hated the segregation he saw all over the South,” Wheeler says. “He’d be told he and his band couldn’t stay at a hotel or eat at a restaurant. He’d say, ‘Man, this is crazy.’ He’d talk to the manager or owner, tell him who he was, and be able to talk them into letting them stay. He wouldn’t confront anyone. He said he was stopped on the road in the South quite a bit by highway patrolmen because he and his band were driving along at night on those back roads. That was always a danger. But Otis more or less laughed about it. Hell, he even said he could get along even with the KKK!”
Redding however was neither an idealist about institutional bigotry, nor would he walk around expecting people to touch his hem. If they did, they might have felt the bulge of a .38 pistol he kept tucked in his waistband under his sport jackets. Lover of country-boy comforts that he was, he had no problem keeping a shotgun in the closet and withdrawing any firearm when he felt he needed to. Alan Walden once said: “We all did. If you travel long enough you are going to meet certain people who will try to take advantage of you and we certainly had our share of fistfights, shootouts, and other harassment; like having to go to the back doors, filthy hotels, and bathrooms or no service at all. During these incidents I feared no man, Otis was a street fighter and with Huck along as his bodyguard they both could handle almost any situation.”17
However, there was at least one situation when they went too far. Days before Redding’s homecoming concert in 1964, one of Otis’s friends, Herbert Ellis, was beaten up after confronting another man, David McGee, who had been flirting with Ellis’s girlfriend. Learning of this, Otis, Sylvester Huckaby, and two others, his childhood running mates George Watson and Bubba Howard, drove in Otis’s flashy Cadillac (stealth apparently wasn’t an issue to them) to McGee’s house on Roy Street, where they got out and began firing through the windows. Otis shot McGee in the thigh and Otis himself was hit by some buckshot fired by McGee or his brother Willie, who was wounded in the stomach by Huckaby. Howard took some buckshot as well, enough to send him to the hospital, before the gang fled in the Cadillac, which was also shot up.
Amazingly, no one was seriously hurt in this Wild West shootout and only Huckaby was charged, with assault with intent to commit murder. More amazingly, nothing seems to have been written about the incident in the local papers and Redding—who was often cut a break by cops in Macon, such as when he was stopped speeding, which he was, a lot—was never detained and, two days later, did the show at the Auditorium, supposedly in cold fear that someone might take a pop at him. Yet in the end, Huckaby was only given two years’ probation. The McGee brothers then filed separate civil suits against Redding; David McGee was awarded a mere five hundred dollars, and Otis settled up with Willie McGee for an undisclosed amount.18
This jaw-dropping shootout, involving one of the top artists in music history, remained generally unknown for decades. Not a word of it appeared at the time in the Macon papers, nor thereafter, and it was buried in the dusty archives of the Bibb County courthouse until the publication of the 2001 Redding biography by Atlanta writer Scott Freeman, who dug up the court papers. Few of the acquaintances who were around Redding say they ever knew of the surreal incident—Alex Hodges, Alan Walden, and Al Bell among them—and given the serious, and potentially disastrous, nature of it, the question naturally arises of whether there was some kind of cover-up, though the juicy details certainly would have made for some salacious headlines across the nation. Still, even if the McGees could have exaggerated the extent of the shootout in their court filings (a strong possibility in light of the lenient penalties involved), the most striking thing about it is the clue it gives into how astonishingly bad Redding’s judgment was. Having come so far, it seems beyond fantasy that on the eve of a major concert, he would have risked everything to uphold the honor of a peep—by perhaps killing someone in a wanton act of violence.
This insane, psychotic episode alone makes a joke out of the oft-chanted hosannas to Otis Redding’s saintly character, one being Steve Cropper’s absurd insistence that Otis “didn’t have any vices, and didn’t have any faults.”19 Redding may well have, as Cropper says, “made everybody feel great . . . always wanting to help people out and always paying people compliments,” and on some level the incident may have said something about Redding’s tenacious loyalty to friends and an old-world sense of eye-for-an-eye street justice. But, given the stakes, and the trivial nature of how the incident began, this was a raw example of abominable judgment, a vivid demonstration that he had not taken to heart anything that the Rev. Otis Redding Sr. had preached on those Sunday mornings.
As a companion postscript, Sylvester Huckaby, after Redding’s death, would file in and out of prison as if through a revolving door, convicted at various times of burglary, grand theft, dealing heroin and cocaine, and—not by surprise—illegal firearms possession. In 1990, he was shot in the head, execution style, as he left his house in Macon, a murder never solved.20
Few would ever have a clue that Otis was not very far from that lifestyle in his youth. At the least, Redding liked to live fast and clearly had some uncontrollable impulses beneath the endless charm and seemingly cool-headed sensibility. The good news was that he had a way and a means—a voice given from God—to avoid a fate like Huckaby’s. That voice, and a lot of money, it must have occurred to him, would be able to make any problem disappear.
WHEN IT came to coping with racial change and peril, Redding, like all other black entertainers running the gauntlet in America, could only hope his music and charm might help out in some small way. “You know, it was sixty-five, sixty-six” says Dennis Wheeler. “What could one man do anyway?”21 Yet perhaps it was not coincidence that, late in 1965, Jim Stewart felt it was time to hire an African-American to an executive job at the company, the only man at Stax who could have been called an activist, and ease the heat.
Enter Al Bell, one of the hippest of industry denizens. Born in Arkansas, Bell had gained notice as a DJ at black radio stations WLOK in Memphis and then WUST in D.C. during the time of the March on Washington, from where he broadcast his show that day. A peripatetic guy, he also owned a soul label, Safice Records, which was likewise being distributed by Atlantic. He was somehow able to walk a tightrope between enterprise and conflict of interest, and promoted soul concerts at the Howard Theater and in Memphis as well, having first run across Otis at one show just after the release of “These Arms of Mine.” Knowing that coming to Stax would be a step down in pay grade for Bell, who was making six figures at the time, and would also necessitate divesting Safice, Stewart nonetheless rang him up. Bell had to admire the man’s chutzpah.
“Al,” he said, “my sister Estelle and I have talked and if you come to Memphis, we’ll give you an equity interest in the company.”
Bell was intrigued, but needed to know what the Stewarts could pay him. “I can give you a hundred dollars cash,” Jim said. “And Jerry Wexler has agreed to give you a hundred dollars.”
Bell laughs. “I just said, ‘Whaaaat!? Man, my momma didn’t bring up no fool.’ He said, ‘Al, think about it.’ And I did, and it began to make sense. I was breaking so many Stax records, it was a small step to work for them, work with Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Booker T. and the MG’s. I loved what was happening at Stax but no one ever knew if it would be here today, gone tomorrow, because it was always in such dire straits, economically.”22 Looking through the broader lens of one small record company standing as a pivotal lever in the future of black music and black capitalism, Bell soon was packing up his Nash Rambler and driving with his wife to Memphis. Absorbing all he could of the operation, he spent two weeks just listening to freshly pressed Stax records. Then he began putting in his two cents on which ones to release, the first of which was “You Don’t Know Like I Know” by Sam and Dave, on Christmas Day.
A man of much intrigue, Bell had also been a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. After dropping out of Philander Smith College in Little Rock in 1959, he’d worked in Midway, Georgia, for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and marched with King in several demonstrations. He left the SCLC when he came to believe that the aim of the movement shouldn’t be passive resistance but, as he puts is, “economic development, economic empowerment.” When he settled into radio, Bell developed something else: a vast pipeline to the black stations across the country. He had done enough favors for Stewart to be repaid with a job at Stax and was hired in 1965 as head of promotions. As a result, it was no coincidence that Stax/Volt product became more in demand and its hits more plentiful. Berry Gordy now had a bigger rival than he could have imagined.