The whir of activity sounded like a resurrection, but deep within, there was an insurrection. Al Bell’s influence had grown with his vision. Since his arrival three short years earlier, his thermometer had sparked sales, his enthusiasm had boosted morale, his energy had lit fires beneath everyone.
Almost everyone.
Al Bell’s ascent was directly related to Estelle Axton’s descent. The relationship had begun amicably. Indeed, Estelle was a fervent supporter of bringing Al into the fold. Estelle and Jim had never seen eye to eye, and that had clearly served the company well; her hunches had proven correct time and again, and the differences between her and Jim had established dual creative spaces—the studio and the record shop—and given the artists plenty of room. Al Bell brought a bigger vision for the company, and gradually he’d won more and more of Jim’s attention, and his trust.
Al Bell wanted to build a “total record company.” He wanted to continue to cultivate artists as Stax had always done, but also to become a major force in distribution. He knew that the wider and deeper a company’s penetration into the market, the greater the sales potential. By signing smaller labels for distribution, he would add heft to his enterprise, raise the company’s chances for being involved in hits, and help those labels that wouldn’t otherwise have access—empowering a middle class for small record labels. He believed in more and bigger, establishing Birdees Music, another publishing company, another Stax arm that might catch a hit. His total record company could, someday, have its own pressing plant, be a promotions giant, employ a major sales force. He could see this conglomerate age, connecting the music industry with film and television: Once Stax was distributing records, it could easily distribute other products—films, and especially videocassettes, in formats just appearing on the trade’s horizon. It could finance those shows, pay itself by including songs from its own publishing companies, and usher its stars to the silver screen. Columbia Records, an example of a total record company, had once been a small label itself, gradually enlarging its web to become the industry’s giant, with powers and interests across many media platforms. So Al signed Arch Records out of St. Louis for distribution, followed soon by Weis Records out of Chicago; he established new distribution for Stax in Canada, England, and France. He sought labels the way he sought talent.
As Al grew the company, he eyed the record store’s real estate. The cash flow it had once provided continued to trickle in with the neighborhood purchases of seventy-nine -and ninety-nine-cent singles. But Al was interested in sales beyond the neighborhood and in purchases greater than a buck. He could read the national trend toward album sales and could count the difference it would make in the company’s bottom line. In 1967, the Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper, and artists began to conceive the LP not as a collection of singles but as a new form of artistic statement. So Al wanted to put teams in place that would help generate more albums, more labels, more hits. He could build a lot of offices where the record store tallied its ninety-nine-cent sales.
When Estelle was asked to relinquish her domain, she could read the writing on the wall. “They wanted the space,” she says. “I had a woman’s intuition. I could feel things before they did happen. They didn’t want me around.” Estelle had become something as radical as the racial activists: a female executive wielding power in a world perceived as not her own. She did not have the same authority as her brother but she exerted the same influence. She got records released, she made decisions about cash flow and salaries and affected the course of business. She held her head high and moved the Satellite Record Shop from the Stax complex to a building across the street. “My shop had become one of the biggest in this part of the country. I had the R&B market sewed up. I reported sales to Billboard for their charts, and Billboard never knew that the Satellite Record Shop was the front end of Stax Records. Every week they called me for my [top sales] list. There was always a Stax record [in my report] that was busting out.” Despite her store’s contributions beyond finances—as a training ground, as a research facility, as a lounge, and as an escape from the studio—her achievements were now considered quaint. This was the cusp of a new decade—new technologies, new horizons. Recorders with sixteen tracks were coming on the market. Televisions were broadcasting in color. Man was about to walk on the moon! Her notions of research were outmoded; real research was going to be done by a new hire, John Smith, an Arkansas native and cousin of Al Bell’s. To pinpoint which songs would be hits, he would helm the company’s Department of Statistics and Market Analysis.
Jim did not support his sister. He’d always be the little brother, and they both would always be strong-willed. Al had a dominant personality too, but there was not the sibling hierarchy, the life history between them. “We kept the record shop open until it became a nuisance factor,” Jim says, referring to the valuable space it occupied that could be offices. “We had to close it.” (Some employees recall her space being replaced by a decorative fountain.) Soon after relocating, she sold the store to Packy’s good friend Johnny Keyes. Johnny kept his day job at a record distributor and Packy managed the store. It quickly went out of business.
Estelle was given an office in the back near Jim’s, though if it was presented as a promotion or sign of respect, she knew better. She’d been assigned publicity duties, but Stax already had a director of publicity in her protégé Deanie Parker. Besides, Estelle didn’t want an executive office, she wanted to keep her hands dirty with hard work. “I couldn’t sit in that office and do nothing,” she says, so she looked for practical ways to help. “I straightened out the mail room because it was a mess. They were getting half the records back because they hadn’t kept the addresses up to date.” Undeterred, she dove into what needed doing.
Before signing the Gulf & Western deal, Jim approached Estelle about fulfilling a lingering obligation they’d discussed in 1965. “Jim and I owned fifty-fifty stock for the publishing and record company,” says Estelle. “Just before this deal went down, Jim came to me and said, I think we should give Al Bell twenty percent off the top. I said, ‘That’s not right. The only way I will sign anything to give away twenty percent is for you to give Steve ten percent and Al ten percent.’ I knew that Steve had worked there longer than Al had, and had helped develop that company to where we’d gotten.”
“It was for service,” Jim says of the financial rearrangment, “work well done. It wasn’t a gift.”
“That turned Al Bell against me,” Estelle continues. “Al Bell had by this time gotten in so tight with the blacks, you could see division—both in the company and outside. I could feel it and could see it, how he would have meetings with some of the blacks and no white was allowed, and this had begun to build up. After Gulf & Western came in, Stax became a conglomerate. Jim and Al were going to get a salary, seventy-five thousand dollars apiece, and they weren’t going to give me anything. I said, ‘This is not going to work. All this stock I’m going to get, I can’t sell them for a term, so what am I going to live on?’ I demanded twenty-five thousand dollars a year. And to this day I’m sorry I didn’t ask for fifty.”
He’d helped land the deal, and power shifted to Al from Estelle. “Instead of being a creative world that we lived in with great songs, great music, camaraderie and all of that, the outside business world trickled into Stax,” says Al. Then, summoning a complacent chivalry, he continues, “And as days would pass, I remember it having a really profound effect on Miz Axton’s attitude and her spirit. We’re talking about major Wall Street corporations and how their decisions and their thinking impacted with us and interfered, and in some instances, prohibited us from doing the things that Miz Axton and Jim enjoyed the most about this business, which was the creative aspect. And she really wanted out from under that. So we made arrangements to buy Mrs. Estelle Axton’s interest, which would allow her to do whatever it is she chose to do with the rest of her life. It’d just gotten to a point where it wasn’t fun to her anymore.”
Jim found himself caught between his sister and his partner. “I had a decision to make,” says Jim, “a very hard decision to make. It involved family versus the company—a very hard choice. Al and my sister did not get along and it had gotten to the point where Al was ready to leave. In the end I made the decision that more people’s livelihoods were at stake than just mine and asked my sister to step down.”
Estelle had risked her home for the company (essentially also risking her marriage) and had as much heart, muscle, and love in the place as anyone. Her commitment was beyond question, and however anyone wanted to frame her departure, she damn sure wasn’t going to fold her cards and walk away, was not going to assume the role of the powerless woman. So each side lawyered up. Jim hired Seymour Rosenberg, the trumpet-playing attorney whom he’d first encountered when Chips Moman sued him for royalties after leaving Stax. “Jim told me one time that he didn’t like me,” laughs Rosenberg, “and that the only reason he wanted me to be his lawyer was he didn’t want me on the other side. I took it as a compliment.”
Talks dragged on until the summer of 1969, and finally all parties hunkered down in a suite in the Holiday Inn Rivermont, the city’s finest hotel. There were two bedrooms connected by a living room, Jim and his lawyer to one side, Estelle and hers to the other. Representatives from the conglomerate occupied the neutral ground. “We had a big bar in the main room and the Gulf & Western people stayed there and had drinks,” explains Rosenberg. “We went back and forth and back and forth and I said, ‘We’re gonna stay here till we make a deal.’” When the smoke cleared, Al Bell and Jim were partners, and Lady A was to receive, according to the July 17, 1969, Redistribution of Earn-Out Agreement, “$490,000 to be paid at the rate of ninety percent of the first debentures used under said agreement until the total amount is reached.” She was a wealthy woman who proceeded to sink her buyout money into a large apartment complex that served her well, and she also collected a $25,000 annual salary for the next five years; in return, she signed a five-year non-compete agreement.
Estelle Axton, May 1968. (Commercial Appeal/Photograph by Jim McKnight)
“I decided to take my money and run,” she says. “But I had to wait five years before I could get back in. I couldn’t have a record shop, I couldn’t have anything that had to do with music.”
There was no grand crescendo, no weepy string arrangement as Lady A made for the door. She had only good wishes for all the friends she was leaving behind, and could exit knowing she’d ignited the sparks that burned so brightly throughout that building. She’d affected the course of American popular music, could point to lasting hits that wouldn’t have existed but for her. Lives had been changed because of her work—hers, her brother’s, her son’s, a real family affair. Purse on her arm, smartly dressed and with a Parliament cigarette between her fingers, her head was held high as she exited the company she’d helped make.
“Estelle was an inspirer,” says Booker. “She had a great sense of humor. She just loved music, loved people. She was always bringing us up there, having us listen to records. She kept us in touch with the music industry. I doubt if there would have ever been a Stax Records without Estelle Axton. She encouraged the entire Stax roster from her little perch behind the counter. She could’ve just as well been sitting in Las Vegas winning a jackpot to see the joy on her face when we made records.”
“Estelle Axton mentored all of us, and encouraged us to pursue our dreams, our professional wishes,” says Deanie Parker. “She was an unusual woman, a natural entrepreneur. She didn’t have formal training in marketing, in sales, or in promotion, but she had more common sense than twenty people put together. She was thinking and operating very professionally—a woman in a man’s world, a white man’s world.”
She’d done more than pick hits. A nurturer, she’d fostered a sense of family, even organizing care packages for Stax employees serving in Vietnam. William C. Brown, John Gary Williams, William Bell, and others all said that those packages fired their spirits, kept them connected with a distant place close to their hearts. “When she left, we were begging her to come back,” says William Bell. “‘Oh, no, our mother has left!’ When the artists were down, she could talk you back. You’d come to the record shop when you couldn’t get a song right and she’d say, ‘It’s going to be all right, just go back and do this and do that.’ And it was like magic. And when she left, the magic was gone. Many artists said, ‘This building will never be the same,’ and it was never the same again.”