The assassin’s gunshot detonated an explosion nationwide. More than a hundred cities broke into riots—Chicago, Washington, DC, Detroit, Los Angeles. American blacks were daily reminded of the institutional bias against them—Kansas City, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Tallahassee, Raleigh, North Carolina—and the eruptions spread. For five days, from coast to coast, the anger ran rampant. There was arson, looting, and untold injuries. More than twenty thousand people were arrested; forty were killed. Many cities called out the National Guard. President Johnson ordered four thousand troops into the nation’s capital.
In Memphis, the riot had occurred at Dr. King’s march the previous week. After the assassination, tanks that had just rolled out of Memphis were called back, positioning themselves on streets normally busy with automobiles. There was occasional unrest, some scattered fires and gunshots, but mostly the shock and awe produced a stunned silence. Blood from the minister of peace stained a Memphis balcony, and decades later stains the city still. Relations between the races in Memphis remain a festering wound, never quite scarred over, unable to fully heal.
“After those losses, not only Dr. King but also Otis and the Bar-Kays,” says Jim Stewart, “it brings reality into focus, the reality of living together in this divided city. It was difficult for the employees, the African-Americans, for me. Relationships were stressed. What can I say to our people? It changed the company.”
Memphis, late March 1968, before Dr. King was assassinated. (University of Memphis Libraries/Special Collections)
At Stax, in the gloom of its three-way misery, Al Bell was struck by a thought. “What hit me with Dr. King’s death,” Al says, “was that it was time to start moving with economic empowerment.” The response to powerlessness, he realized, could be an assumption of power. Like the fighter rising from the mat, Al shook off the daze, felt the engines fire. “What I had in mind as a businessperson was to go into the marketplace with strength.” As a child, Al had worked for his father, landscaping, sent out with the burly workers to fell trees. “My father used to tell me, ‘Keep up,’ and he put me out there with the rest of the men. And if I didn’t keep up, I’d be reprimanded that evening when I got home. So this situation at Stax was just another battle for me.”
In the years since Al’s stay with Dr. King in Georgia, a growing faction within the movement sought to bring strength back to the community by supporting locally owned businesses, enriching and empowering the people and places where one lived, instead of distant or absent landlords and owners. Support the neighborhood, and build out from there. The natural extension was locating leaders who could advocate for local needs in politics. The name given to this movement brought fear to the hearts of the established white leadership: Black Power. In 1966, SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in its first published statement on Black Power, defined the effort: “When the Negro community is able to control local office and negotiate with other groups from a position of organized strength, the possibility of meaningful political alliances on specific issues will be increased.” Further, they contrasted it with what it’s not: “SNCC proposes that it is now time for the black freedom movement to stop pandering to the fears and anxieties of the white middle class in the attempt to earn its ‘good-will,’ and to return to the ghetto to organize these communities to control themselves.”
Stax, however unintentionally, had essentially done just that—tuned in to its immediate environment, lifting the neighborhood with itself. Though integrated and white-owned, Stax had become an example of Black Power’s potential. “Because of segregation,” says Al, “we African-Americans were doing what every other ethnic group had done in America: We had our own hotels, our own banks, our own insurance companies, and et cetera. And I recognized at an early age that that economic base is what caused others to be mainstreamed. Your Italian bankers dealt with Korean bankers and Chinese bankers and Greek bankers. If our banks had been allowed to grow, then we would have been able to relate to the other banks in this country. But that was cut off. We got programmed into saying, ‘Two, four, six, eight, we want to integrate.’ That stopped what progress we were making.”
Al’s vision of a capitalized African-American populace could be realized at Stax. Stax had made music the third-largest industry in Memphis, generating $100 million in the local economy. “Forefront in my mind,” says Al, “was to take this natural resource that we have, which is music, and turn it into something that becomes an economic generator that enables us to build a power base.” Amid the fury and passion that roiled within his city and his own being, Al Bell was finding a way to create opportunity. “Otis was dead, Sam and Dave gone, our catalog was gone, and the industry was saying, ‘Stax Records is dead,’ and ‘It’s impossible for Stax to come back from that.’ Well, I refused to accept that. And I persuaded others that we could go forward from here.” He had experienced Atlantic Records release conferences, conventions of their wholesale distributors, “and I would watch Jerry Wexler, so eloquent, the passion, how he related to all of the music. It was personal with him.”
Al conceived a huge promotions event—the simultaneous release of about thirty albums and thirty singles to create an instant catalog. A sales conference that would draw the industry to Memphis. It could be so big it would run two weekends, not one. It could spawn a TV special. Cooking inside Al Bell was nothing less than an industry-wide soul explosion to premiere the new Stax Records. At the Atlantic conferences, “you would walk away with the feeling of Atlantic, who also distributed Atco, Stax, Volt, and all these other labels—as the premier independent record company. And they would sell several million dollars’ worth of product. I knew we had to present ourselves as viable and formidable with these independent wholesale buyers.” It would be high-tech, high-class, a clear statement that Stax, far from dead, was thinking grandly, spending lavishly, a key player in the music industry. Once it had some new recordings.
“Al Bell is a very spiritual person, perhaps whose real calling was to be a minister,” says Rev. Jesse Jackson, who met Al in Memphis shortly after Dr. King’s assassination. “Al’s mantra is, ‘Let not your heart be troubled. No matter how difficult circumstances are, let not your heart be troubled.’ It is a way of saying that we have to be survivors. Al is a dream maker, an odds buster.”
Dream maker. Not Dr. King’s dream, but Al Bell’s American dream: middle-class status for everyone. “To get from where I came from in Arkansas to where I was at that point in time,” says Al, “was a fight. Nothing but a constant fight.” He envisioned an expanding Stax Records. The more people it employed, the more who would rise from struggle to prosperity. A soul explosion would put the company back to work, would up the odds for a hit, would quickly establish catalog sales. But first, needing material fast, Al went to the vault; Atlantic owned everything they’d released, but not what was unreleased. He found a Booker T. & the MG’s track and gave it to Terry Manning, a young engineer at nearby Ardent Studios, where Stax would send its overflow work. Terry added marimbas to give it a new shine, an infectious effect leading to an appropriate title: “Soul Limbo.” Stax hired a sales manager, Ewell Roussell, who’d worked for the regional distributor of Stax, Atlantic, and other labels, and Roussell began assembling a sales force. They’d make this a hit.
“We were angry,” says Jim Stewart, invigorated by Al and ready to prove himself to Wexler. “Those first records, we were so damn determined.” Released in May 1968 while Stax was still sorting out its future, “Soul Limbo” shot to the top-ten R&B, top-twenty pop, running arm in arm with the simultaneous Stax release of Eddie Floyd’s “I’ve Never Found a Girl” (featuring Booker’s gorgeous string arrangements), reaching number-two R&B and pop top forty. The pulse was strengtening.
Studio A, 1968. L–R: James Alexander, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson (rear), Eddie Floyd (back to camera), Homer Banks, Booker T. Jones. (Photograph by Jonas Bernholm)
These hits let Stax catch its breath and, before embarking on the soul explosion, it turned to a more immediate threat. Soulsville, the neighborhood around Stax, had changed with the riots. There’d always been an underlying poverty, but it was never as dominant as the sense of community that defined the place. Now that poverty was made manifest. After the March riots, many looted businesses did not reopen. Windows and doors were boarded up and stayed that way. Quietly, a fear crept through. What once bustled now felt busted. “We had to be more security conscious,” says Jim. “Up until that time, anybody could walk through our doors and we’d stop and listen. After the assassination, the community was totally disrupted. We had to increase security. I mean, this is not what the company is about.”
While vandals had wreaked havoc on absentee landlords throughout Soulsville, they’d respected the Stax facility. But that symbol of pride became, to some, an isolated prosperity, and it provoked a smoldering resentment. One gang—a couple thugs really—saw the fancy cars and the big-name stars going in and out of 926. McLemore, and they wanted a piece of the profits. In the shadows of Dr. King’s murder, strong-arms fed on the undercurrent of trepidation, extorting small businessmen: Pay us to be protected—from us.
These toughs monitored the parking lot across the street from Stax, and when musicians parked where they’d been parking for years, these thugs hassled and hustled, thieving even words from the legitimate movement. “For the cause,” they hissed. “The cause” implied a political purpose and a moral obligation, and instead of nickel-and-diming, the demands were higher. Ten bucks. Twenty. Your life. For the cause. Steve and Duck got hit, so did others. “I was threatened,” says Booker T. Jones. “People trying to extort money from me, threatening to kidnap me.” Threats continued, and the men began walking the ladies to their cars after work.
The horn players bought small weapons, and others did too. “It got pretty intense around there,” says Duck. “Al sent me to West Memphis, Arkansas. I bought five thiry-eight pistols. He said, ‘Anybody gives you any shit, pull the trigger.’” (Duck adds quickly, “Shit, I didn’t shoot nobody. Well, I maybe ought to have, but I wouldn’t have the guts to do it. I’d probably get shot.”)
“It was a continuous problem,” says Jim of the neighborhood antagonists. “I even went to the FBI. ‘Too bad’ was the way he put it. ‘You’re over there on McLemore Avenue, what are you doing over there anyway?’ That kind of mentality. So we decided, ‘Okay, if you’re not going to take care of the problem we’re going to have to take care of it ourselves.’”
Stax brought in someone who was not uncomfortable with either end of a gun. He’d fire a pistol and stare at a gun barrel with equal equanimity. “Johnny Baylor was a New York street hustler,” says Jim. “We brought Johnny in, Al knew him from somewhere. He came in essentially as a security man.”
“Johnny Baylor, firstly, was a very personal friend of mine, someone I knew long before he ever set foot in Memphis, Tennessee,” says Al, who would soon also carry a gun. They met when Al was starting his small label in Washington, DC. “Johnny came from Alabama, and moved at an early age with his family to Harlem in New York. Johnny defended himself on the streets, and in life. He was a boxer, he worked in Sugar Ray Robinson’s corner. Johnny was also involved in the recorded music business.”
Johnny Baylor went bang when he entered a room. He wore fine suits, tailored. He cut clean and sharp as a blade. Baylor favored sunglasses. If you couldn’t see his eyes, you could feel them, the pupils shooting stilettos. One associate said, “Whenever he was in the room, you felt uncomfortable, and he cultured that. That was part of his weaponry.”
Meet Johnny Baylor (right, sunglasses). Isaac Hayes is second from left. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)
He’d served with the Rangers in the army, Special Ops, the cold killers. Regimentation suited his personality, and he mastered it, first in lockstep among the corps, later as a street capo. “You ever heard of the Black Mafia?” asks Randy Stewart, a boxer turned record promoter who would later work for Stax and knew Johnny from Sugar Ray Robinson’s Harlem barbershop. “Johnny Baylor come out of that territory. Johnny was a good person, but he didn’t take no shit. I saw those guys shooting guns down One-hundred-twenty-fifth Street. They were for real.”
Baylor’s right-hand fist was Dino Woodard, a Memphis boy born and raised, who’d met Baylor through Sugar Ray Robinson. Sugar Ray, a champion boxer, was a Harlem hero and entrepreneur whose domain included a barbershop where boxers and musicians congregated, where Baylor learned to drink a daily cup of beef blood with a raw egg in it—to build strength. Dino, who’d come to New York in the radiant glow of Golden Gloves, wound up in the training ring with Ray, who was, Dino says simply, “the greatest fighter pound for pound.” Dino was a fighter who could keep Ray interested, who could take a beating and give one too. (“Dino was built like a wall,” says Duck.) Dino was slower than a champ, couldn’t read his opponent quickly enough, but he lumbered with awesome power out of the ring, he would be all smiles and fun until Johnny’s order came to flip the switch. Fun Dino gone, mean Dino here. Dino was also known by his favorite catchphrase—“Boom,” or the more complex “Boom boom”—which, depending on its emphasis, its sentence placement, or the hand gestures that accompanied it, could have as many meanings as there are varieties of explosions. Dino made an excellent lieutenant in Baylor’s small army.
When I get to heaven, St. Peter’s gonna say
How’d you earn your living, how’d you earn your pay
I will reply with a whole lot of anger
Earned my pay as an Airborne Ranger
Living my life full of danger
“If you run into him in a fistfight or something like that,” says Dino of Baylor, “he would come out on top, because of his experience in the Rangers and knowing about ammunition. There were—there may have been some guns around. And we were fortunate, I guess, to keep from getting arrested. But how he would do it, boom, that’s another thing. He was just a good guy who really wanted African-Americans to be all right.” Johnny Baylor wanted no more compromises. He had high ideals and low—but effective—means to achieve them. Baylor was always on the attack, whether shaking hands with businessmen or threatening punks. Each moment of every day was about accruing and maintaining power.
Baylor was invited to Memphis by Al’s valet, Mac Guy. Busy growing a company, Al hired Guy to help with the mundane activities: Mac drove Al’s kids to school, ran errands for him and his wife, Lydia, was a messenger for Al at the office. “Mac and I had a great relationship. And he was close with Johnny Baylor. So when Mac realized that these black guys on the street were threatening me at Stax,” says Al, “Mac called Johnny Baylor and the next thing I knew, Johnny Baylor was in Memphis and asking me, ‘Dick’—we called each other Dick—‘What’s going on, Dick?’ I was surprised to see him there.”
The harassment problem could be solved quickly and easily by Johnny Baylor. But Baylor was a man who breathed control if he breathed at all, and having Johnny Baylor around to solve problems could, Al knew with the immediacy of Johnny’s presence, lead to new problems. Such, however, were the issues and the times. “Some want to make Stax appear, with Johnny Baylor moving into our environment, to be gangsters or something like that, because Johnny had a gun.” But the gun, Al points out, is an American institution, a tool employed often by the white majority. “I resist all that gangster talk, and in many instances it pisses me off, because in America, the gun is how European-Americans established a footprint and dominance in this country. The National Rifle Association is one of the most influential organizations in America. In the South, we’re not real southerners if we don’t have a shotgun, let alone the other weapons that we carry.”
Johnny only carried a gun because he would use it. “Johnny and I were able to go out and meet the head of the gang that was challenging the artists,” Dino Woodard states. “We let them know that, hey, they cannot bother the artists because it disturbed the mentality of the mind. They cannot work. They cannot record properly. We let them know that there wasn’t gonna be any more robberies.” Dino slips into quiet reflection: “A lot of people are not thinking about death, even though they are hollering and challenging people. We let them know that even though they did have guns, we were ready to die for our rights, for Stax artists, and the protection of Al Bell. Stax was accumulating jobs for African-American people and we wasn’t gonna have the challenge from them. Boom. When we faced them, they could see that we was serious. It’s do or die.”
“Johnny had a rather clear-cut and well-defined conversation with the thugs,” says Al, “and I think they clearly understood, for after that discussion, we ceased to have problems from them.”
With the street problem swept away—a trifle to Baylor, really—Johnny Baylor looked around and liked what he saw. One of his sidelines was a record label, Koko, a nod to his favorite boxing moment—the KO, or knockout. Among the few artists he represented was the handsome and mellifluous vocalist Luther Ingram, who would later deliver one of the great love songs of the 1970s, “If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don’t Wanna Be Right).” There was legitimate business he could have with Stax beyond the continued security issues in which he could assist.
“Johnny Baylor was a very smart guy,” says Rev. Jesse Jackson. “Very streetwise, very savvy. A lot of the kind of street elements that you have to deal with in the record business—Baylor was fit for the task and was loyal. He made a big contribution to the Stax development.” Baylor took a suite in a Memphis Holiday Inn, but kept his apartment in New York City.
With the immediate environment cleaned up, a few records out, and the business engines firing, the Stax executives could turn their eyes to the farther horizon. “Our contract had run out with Atlantic Records and so it was up for sale to somebody or we’d have to go independent,” says Estelle. “We didn’t think we could handle it independently. It takes a lot of money to be independent.” Atlantic had carried a lot of the financial risk—floating the pressing-plant fees, for example, or waiting for the slow payments from distributors. Independent labels could be easily caught short of cash, finding themselves suddenly vulnerable to takeover. “You have to think about your competitors out there,” Estelle continues. “They’re going to swallow you up if they can.”
“I had a rude awakening at that point in the record business,” says Jim. “I decided, ‘What the hell have I been working for all these years?’ I had made no money up to that point, putting everything back into the company. I might as well get something out of it. We were looking for capital gains, basically.”
After they’d decided not to be sold with Atlantic to Warner Bros., Stax sought a new patron. They’d engaged in discussions with a variety of larger labels and companies, but nothing had developed. “We needed money to operate,” says Al Bell. “And I had a dear friend who really became our angel, a gentleman by the name of Clarence Avant. He was a master salesperson, but more importantly, he was respected throughout the big-business world, particularly in the entertainment world. I spoke to him about our situation, and Clarence knew Charlie Bluhdorn at Gulf & Western. So Clarence took this little company that had no master tape catalog, this little company that had lost its flagship artist, this little company that no one believed could be raised from the dead, and sold that company to Gulf & Western for us.”
Gulf & Western Industries, which began in Michigan manufacturing automobile parts, had become one of the earliest and largest conglomerates of the new business era. By the late 1960s, its holdings included the Kayser-Roth clothing manufacturers (owners of the Miss Universe pageant), New Jersey Zinc, sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic, a financial services company, and Consolidated Cigars. At the time of the Stax purchase, G&W was also negotiating with Armour & Co., one of America’s largest meatpackers, and Allis & Chambers, an international leader in industrial manufacturing. “Their gross sales in 1967,” says Jim, “were equivalent to that of the entire recording industry, in excess of seven hundred million dollars.” In 1967, G&W purchased the Paramount Pictures movie studio, which itself was a mini-empire; among its holdings were Famous Music, one of the oldest music publishing companies, and Dot Records, a label that was home to Pat Boone, a giant in 1950s pop music.
PARAMOUNT TO BUY THE STAX COMPLEX was the May 1968 headline in Billboard, and the article explained, “Jim Stewart . . . will continue to helm the Stax/Volt companies reporting directly to Arnold D. Burk, Paramount Pictures vice-president in charge of music operations . . . Burk added that no changes in the distribution setup of Stax is contemplated and that Stax would continue to be handled mostly by independent distributors.” Paramount recognized that Stax had, during its tenure with Atlantic, created a successful, working apparatus that was best not disturbed; Gulf & Western would provide the operating capital for Stax to continue doing what it did best. “Gulf & Western were trying to expand their record division,” Jim confirms. “We were selling our stock, but we were going to maintain the company’s operations.” Jim anticipated a barely perceptible change. “There was no transition,” he says. “I just picked up the phone and said to the distributor, ‘You won’t be paying Atlantic next month, you’ll be paying us.’” Stax in Memphis would report to Paramount in California; Paramount to Gulf & Western in New York City.
Gulf & Western gave Stax over $4 million. Less than a quarter of that was cash; some was common stock in Gulf & Western, and lots of it was in convertible debentures that could be redeemed only after a specified period of time. These debentures were issued to Stax, and the value and the return on the debentures were based on Stax’s net revenues; in other words, the better Stax did as a company, the more money it received. The company’s attorney Seymour Rosenberg did not learn of the deal until after its conclusion, and he was not impressed: “In essence, Gulf & Western bought Stax with Stax’s own money. They paid them out of profits. If there wasn’t any profits there wouldn’t have been any payment.”
The Gulf & Western sale restored a stability to Stax, relieving them of the financial pressures that came with the loss of their catalog, and the loss of hitmakers Otis Redding and Sam and Dave. “Gulf & Western were a very large company and we thought they would give us the visibility that we needed,” says Jim. “Like the kid that leaves home, we didn’t have that big Atlantic machine to protect us. And we didn’t have the capital to be on our own. Under that sale, we became more or less a division of Paramount Pictures. Paramount—we’re talking big time.”
Not that Stax was small potatoes, and Paramount quickly capitalized on its latest acquisition, hiring Booker T. Jones to score an upcoming film, Up Tight. The film by Jules Dassin, who’d made the provocative movie Never on Sunday, was an updated version of a 1935 John Ford film, The Informer, a story of betrayal and emotional disintegration. Dassin changed the setting from Dublin and the Irish Republican Army to Cleveland, Ohio, and an African-American gang. Preceding the “blaxploitation” genre by several years, Up Tight was a serious movie on a low budget, and Booker, twenty-three years old, gave it his all. He began post-production work in Hollywood, then moved with the production to Paris, France (witnessing there the May 1968 uprisings). In the City of Light, looking at the River Seine, he came up with a melody. Far from his usual location, he could easily stretch out. The MG’s joined him there to record the soundtrack. “DJs liked the records to be two minutes and thirty seconds,” Booker says. “And ‘Time Is Tight’ is double that. We were starting to disregard radio’s restrictions. But Bob Dylan was doing that too, and some others.” Paris was good for inspiration, but the recording facility was not up to the MG’s standards. After laying down the movie’s soundtrack, the band returned to Stax to re-record the soundtrack album. “Time Is Tight” became one of their most enduring hits, reaching the top ten of both the pop and R&B charts. The song moves in fuguelike parts—a slow, melancholy meditation on the organ, a choogling guitar section that is funky and danceable, then back to the melancholia, as if someone has broken from a fever dream of exuberance to realize, alas, the euphoria and intensity at that temperature could not endure.
Others around Stax could see that this alliance with the movie studio might prove fruitful; both Carla Thomas and William Bell began taking acting lessons. Eddie Floyd, perhaps with an eye toward Gulf & Western’s origins, took up drag racing.
While there were portents of change at Stax with this new relationship, the nation’s racial relationships seemed immalleable. Racism still held sway in 1968. Though President Johnson had passed the Civil Rights Act four years earlier and one could point to concrete changes all about—bus seating, bathrooms, water fountains, and dining rooms were open to anyone anywhere (by law and, slowly but increasingly, by custom)—it was also easy to see how little had changed. The Memphis Police Department reviewed the sanitation strike when it was over and determined that Memphis had been the object of “outside provocation.” They ignored the facts and instead suggested that AFSCME had riled up the workers and instigated the strike. The department’s response was to buy more helicopters, mace, and riot helmets.
The civil rights movement lurched forward with its leader gone. Rev. Ralph Abernathy took charge of the SCLC, and a month after Dr. King’s assassination, thousands of impoverished blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and others began a march from diverse places in the South to Washington, actualizing Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign. The intention was to widen the movement’s base, breaking beyond race issues to economics, but unity proved elusive. Though thousands converged and built a camp on the National Mall, their effort was undermined by infighting and disagreement. Living conditions were difficult, and morale was hit hard when Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 6. Less than three weeks later, police routed the encampment with tear gas, and the protestors departed, their goals unfulfilled.
When Stax artists discuss race, nearly all call Stax an “oasis”—the same word recurs in interview after interview. Did those social problems not exist, or did the continued success serve to mask them? “Things changed because of King’s assassination,” Steve says. “I can tell you that prior to that, there was never ever any color that came through the doors. Didn’t happen. And after that, it was never the same.”
It never was the same, but everyone had always seen color. The beauty was that till then, no one had cared. The anger that followed the assassination made people care. With the veil of innocence lifted, race emerged in ways it hadn’t before. Al Jackson suddenly gave Duck the cold treatment. “It was tense,” says Duck. “I turned around to Al and said, ‘Al, I got to get this off my chest.’ I said, ‘You won’t talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong?’ And he told me another musician accused me of being racist. I said, ‘Al, if that’s the truth, God strike me dead today.’ And he looked at me. He called me Dundy Dunn Dunn. He says, ‘Dundy Dunn Dunn, what more can I ask?’” Duck shakes his head. “The n-word. I didn’t allow that word in my house. I worked with Booker and Al and I couldn’t handle that word. And I think I even changed my mother and my father about that. I really do.”
After Dr. King’s murder, there was conflicting opinion among civil rights groups about how best to proceed. The failure of the Poor People’s Campaign heightened those tensions. “Nonviolence has died with King’s death,” Eldridge Cleaver, a Black Panther activist, declared. The armed revolution seemed to be at hand. In the summer of 1968, at the annual meeting of the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers (NATRA), activism was everywhere. NATRA’s convention drew a racially mixed crowd including record company presidents, promotions men, songwriters, and others associated with music, but the organization was established as a forum for African-American broadcasters, and that remained its core. The 1968 theme was “The New Breed’s New Image Creates Self Determination and Pride,” which meant, according to Executive Secretary Del Shields, “this loosely is our translation of Black Power and Soul Power.”
Trouble was brewing well before the group convened in mid-August. A month prior, a venue change was announced in Jet, one of the nation’s leading magazines directed at a black audience. According to the magazine, the “plush Marco Polo Hotel reportedly made a ‘last-minute’ demand that the National Assn. of TV and Radio Announcers (NATRA) post a $25,000 bond in advance of the group’s annual convention . . . to cover property damages and unpaid accounts that might accrue during the predominantly Negro group’s affair . . . A $10,000 offer to Marco Polo was rejected.” The event relocated and NATRA stated its intention “to file suit . . . charging the establishment with rank discrimination.”
The president of NATRA, E. Rodney Jones, a prominent DJ in Chicago, told Billboard that the group planned to address “the nation’s problems on a sociological level. Many who expect to attend are hopeful that even more deejays will lend their efforts to easing tensions.” By the time the convention rolled around, a subset of the more radical-minded activists had formed, calling themselves the Fair Play Committee. Two of its members were Johnny Baylor and Dino Woodard. Exactly what happened at the Miami convention is disputed—various reports indicate Marshall Sehorn, the white partner of black New Orleans producer and musician Allen Toussaint, was pistol-whipped; or that Phil Walden, Otis’s white manager, received death threats; or that Jerry Wexler was accused of stealing from Aretha Franklin and his effigy was hung in the hotel lobby. The pernicious mood extended onto, and emanated from, the dais, where speakers riled and goaded the crowd.
“There was a changing racial climate throughout the country,” says Jim. “But nobody ever came to me and said, ‘Get out of the record business or we’ll blow you away.’ Nobody threatened me. Al was like a buffer. They couldn’t destroy Stax without destroying one of their own. I never had any confrontations.”
Jerry Wexler was not so lucky. “That infamous convention in Miami was a big turning point,” he says. “A certain element thought that it was gonna be their time to actually take possession of the record companies and the radio stations. And the emcee was whipping them up. ‘It’s your time, boys. Go and grab it.’ I’m sitting there to receive an award for Aretha Franklin when King Curtis got me and said, ‘You’re out of here right now.’ He said somebody was coming after me—a part of this irredentist movement, they were gonna off me. It was one of those moments when the surge of Black Power infected the whole record business.” Southern soul wasn’t over, but it was a time for new sounds, and under new authority.
At Stax, the front door—long the symbol of the studio’s connection to the neighborhood, and through which had walked, uninvited, several of its biggest stars—was locked. A twelve-foot cyclone fence was installed around the parking lot, and a guard was stationed at the back gate to monitor who entered, preventing that uninvited future star from popping in to announce him or herself. The open-door policy was effectively terminated.
A short eight years earlier, Wayne Jackson and some other kids were pulling seats out of the theater. Now a company stood there. “The family feeling that we had,” says Wayne, “that fraternity of young guys who couldn’t even conceive of a job that much fun, and Otis Redding and all that we did—suddenly was gone. There were people with guns in the house. That really put a cold towel on the party. It wasn’t any fun to go there. They put the big fences up and a guard: Fort Stax.”
