Memphis has torn down more history than most other cities even have, a longtime Beale Street merchant named Abram Schwab used to say. A tour of Memphis is an excursion to empty lots and vacant buildings, an outing to see what used to be. The tour guide’s refrain becomes, “Imagine on this weedy site . . .” Memphis despised its African-American culture, was ashamed of exactly what the world loved us for, dismissive of what made us unique. The business leaders and politicians who run this overgrown cotton crossroads so shuddered at being recognized for blues and soul that, somewhat methodically, they tore most of its history down.
The Memphis mentality is to blend with the crowd, to look like the reflection in the 1970s and 1980s mirrored buildings in Atlanta or Houston. Memphis prefers freshly laid plastic to anything historic and distinct. Beale Street was saved, but not before the body that supported Beale, the neighborhood around the street, was mowed down in the name of urban renewal. The rebuilt Beale disdained history, moving signage wantonly, “improving” what it wanted, imitating Bourbon Street’s liquor mall. The path where Dr. King marched has been largely erased. The first Piggly Wiggly, the first Holiday Inn—anything old in Memphis, including churches, gets swept away. Hide what we don’t like, then pretend it doesn’t exist.
The building stood neglected from 1976 until it was torn down in 1989. (Stax Museum of American Soul Music)
This oppressive environment squeezes freethinkers to the margins, creating an unintentional incubator. It provides opportunity for Jim Stewart, for Al Bell, for their unlikely union. Al, born with a vision far-seeing and wide, and a determination to explore its outer reaches; Jim, ever cautious but bighearted and ready for change, with great ears and a strong commercial sensibility. They united, created so much good, so much opportunity—especially for those who’d never had such opportunity. Each man gave careers, wealth, and new life to those around him, but each man also caused many of those gifts to be painfully retracted. Neither intentionally harmed anyone, but like distracted parents, they each, after achieving great benefit, wrought great destruction.
“One day you’re making records,” says Jim Stewart, then “you leave court and you find out you’re not.” Less than a month after the forcible eviction, Stax had its day in court. January 12, 1976—gloomy, windy, and gray. Federal bankruptcy judge William Leffler, siding with the creditors, ordered the building padlocked and the company to cease doing business. According to guards posted on-site, Jim sat in his car in the parking lot behind the old Capitol Theater, barred from entering the business he had founded. He looked at the building—fifteen years spent there, rented it for a hundred bucks a month, bought the block, sold it for millions; Jim had had it all. After about thirty minutes, he drove away.
“How can you say it grew too fast when you start at zero in terms of master tape value in l968 and by 1974 the company is valued at sixty-seven million dollars?” opines Al Bell, indignant nearly four decades after the fact. “Grow that fast for me if you will.”
The test of insolvency is whether liabilities exceed assets. There’s no doubt that Stax (and its affiliates) owed the bank in excess of $10 million and had many other debts. But much harder to calculate was the value of Stax’s assets. Stax was made up of three broad entities: the Stax Record Company/Stax Organization, which owned real estate, recording equipment, subsidiary labels, artist contracts, and master tapes; the publishing companies, primarily East/Memphis Music and Birdees Music, which owned a combined total of over three thousand copyrights, many of which were already classics receiving continued play by their original Stax artists and also covered by other artists; and then various investment offshoots, primarily tax shelters. The value of these shelters, along with Stax’s real estate, was easy enough to assess. The valuation problem was in the tapes and the copyrights. “Independent auditors look very, very askance at unusual types of securities,” explains the bank’s attorney Wynn Smith. “And masters are, to put it mildly, a very unusual type of security. I think the bank’s judgment was that the value that had been assigned to those assets was just ridiculous, totally unjustified.”
Stax filed a reorganization plan in bankruptcy court in June 1976, over the objections of Union Planters. “I see hope coming my way,” declared Al. “There is no doubt about it: Stax can be successful again.”
Jim Stewart, in that same period, said, “I am saying to you that the same assets are still within the company now, because it’s in the minds of the principals, and the creative people at Stax are still here. It’s here [indicating his head]. I’m not asking for credit. I’m just saying, ‘Don’t underrate Stax.’”
Bill Matthews, the bank’s chairman of the board, had other ideas: “I think Stax owes too much money to be viable. There doesn’t appear to be enough credibility in the marketplace for it to be the same business it was.” Then Matthews took a more solicitous tone. “For the good of the community, [Union Planters would] like to see the music industry prosper and do well in Memphis. But you can’t just say it, you have to have a way.” Matthews championed the bank’s idea of an album comprising vaulted Stax material that would be released in the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King. The album, continued the self-appointed record executive, could generate enough profits to give Stax working capital; he encouraged local African-American entrepreneurs to buy the bank’s interest in the firm and use the profits from the album for the record company’s further development.
Al Bell was undeterred by the legal lockdown. “Those who forcibly render on us involuntary bankruptcy can only attain liabilities such as empty buildings,” he said. “I hasten to caution the hunter to take care that he is not consumed by the prey he seeks to devour.”
The bluster on all sides continued until midsummer, when arguments about Stax’s viability were made before Judge Leffler in bankruptcy court. The bank argued that Stax’s total debt, by some estimates to be over $30 million, made it impossible for the company to recover, especially with their star artist now recording for another label. Stax brought witnesses to substantiate the value of their tapes, including a Motown consultant who estimated their worth at “$21 million not discounted” and also a competing record label owner who suggested a potential “between $4 million and $5 million in revenue for the first year, if Stax were allowed to re-open.” The judge ruled that although Stax was a “financial holocaust” with little hope of success, it could reopen if it posted a $500,000 indemnity bond or $500,000 in cash within one week to protect present creditors. Stax proved unable to present the necessary funds, and a week later, Judge Leffler declared Stax out of business, allowing the trustee for Stax’s creditors to begin selling off the pieces. The recording equipment netted $50,000 and was scattered among several studios in town. The office furniture was bought by an auction house. Pieces broke off and drifted away.
The publishing companies were sold in February 1977 to Al Bennett—an Arkansas man who’d founded Liberty Records in 1955 and negotiated a variety of music industry deals; he gave the bank a cashier’s check for $250,000, with the promise to pay the balance of the $1.8 million sales price over the next five years. Billboard described Bennett as “elated.” In mid-March 1982, Bennett more than doubled his investment when he sold the Stax publishing catalogs to Rondor Publishing. In 2000, Rondor was sold for $400 million; East/Memphis was one of Rondor’s several gems, alongside songs by the Beach Boys, Tom Petty, Michael Jackson, Al Green, and others. The value of the copyrights was proving to be incalculable.
Stax’s catalog of master tapes was sold at auction, but not before both Union Planters and CBS tried to claim them. In the court case, according to the appeal ruling, “Union Planters averred that a primary purpose of CBS in its dealings in this case was to gain control of a substantial portion of the ‘soul music market’ and specifically to gain control, dominion and beneficial ownership of Stax for said purpose to the detriment of Stax and its creditors.” The court ruled that the tapes should be sold, and the trustee should disburse funds to the various suppliers, artists, and other creditors. At auction, Al Bennett, who’d bought the publishing, bid $3.7 million for the tapes, but lost to the $1.3 million bid by the NMC Company, a Los Angeles–based liquidation firm; Bennett proposed installment payments and the judge took cash on the barrelhead. Before 1977 was out, the catalog was sold to an intermediary, Elan Enterprises, who then sold it to Fantasy Records of Berkeley, California. Fantasy was home to Credence Clearwater Revival and was also purchasing catalogs, including jazz labels Prestige and Riverside.
In 1977, Fantasy hired Stax songwriter David Porter to revive Stax, with the intention of not only mining the unreleased material—Albert King’s The Pinch is a great album from that time, and the Bar-Kays “Holy Ghost” finally got a proper release—but also signing new talent. Despite a solid effort, the label closed after a year and a half. Porter has continued to produce and write songs, and he and Isaac resumed their friendship, like true friends do. The Hayes-Porter collaboration yielded some of the soul era’s most enduring hits. A successful businessman, Porter continues to work in music, developing artists and writing songs. Fantasy understood what the Stax catalog offered, and under the direction of Bill Belmont, it kept Stax in the marketplace, introducing the music to successive generations. In early 2005, Concord Records purchased Fantasy for $80 million and reactivated Stax as a recording entity, signing Isaac Hayes, Booker T. Jones, and other artists, in addition to continuing the profitable re-releasing of the classic catalog.
These prices substantiate the latent value of Stax. The music business is built on catalog sales: that is, the artists and songs that sell for decades. The Stax hits have proved timeless, the biggest kind of hits. The performances are honest all these years later; the songs still sing from the heart. That’s the sound of the master tapes and the publishing rights accruing value. Hits, however, can’t be predicted with any certainty, and so the valuation of the catalog and publishing company at the time of the label’s demise is not a scientific determination. Tim Whitsett notes that most of the East/Memphis catalog was recorded by Stax, so if Stax was not releasing records, the publishing company’s value would diminish quickly. Conversely, significant value was gained when Congress in 1976 extended the duration of copyright ownership.
There are, nonetheless, authoritative opinions that agree with Al’s overall position that the assets decidedly outweighed the liabilities. “If Stax Records had been properly assessed,” says CBS’s Logan Westbrooks, “they would not have been forced into bankruptcy. But at that time, it was rather difficult to anticipate the value of those master tapes. And even the publishing division, where you think in terms of five, ten, fifteen years ahead—it has proven to be unusually valuable, no question about that—but could you make that analysis at that particular time? It was most difficult.”
In the wake of Stax’s closing, Al Bell was sued by the Chase Manhattan Bank of New York and the Tri State Bank (an African-American-owned bank in Memphis), by an interior designer, and by a host of others to whom he owed money. The IRS filed a lien against him; Union Planters foreclosed on property he owned.
In July 1976, during the heat of summer, while Stax was in bankruptcy court, Al Bell’s biggest trial began: fourteen counts of conspiring to defraud the Union Planters National Bank of $18 million. “They did a marvelous job in putting together the evidence against me, some with forged signatures,” says Al. “If I hadn’t known me, and if I hadn’t known what had taken place, I would have thought I was guilty. Fortunately, James F. Neal, who was my defense counsel, exposed the conspiracy.” On the stand, a cohort of Harwell’s from the bank (and a former member of the Memphis band Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs—“Wooly Bully” to you) testified that Harwell had shown him how he “could sign Mr. Bell’s name as well as Mr. Bell could.” Further, Neal brought a witness who’d heard bank officials brag, using a racial slur, about “running those” blacks “and especially the chief” black “out of town.”
Al’s trial ran for three weeks, and the jury of eight men and four women (seven of whom were African-American) deliberated only seven hours and fifteen minutes. Bell was acquitted on all counts—guilty of nothing—and former banker Joe Harwell was found guilty of making false entries on a bank record and with misapplication of bank funds. Though Harwell’s attorney argued that his client was being made a scapegoat to help the bank explain heavy losses, Harwell confessed to signing Bell’s signature to loan guarantees, and to having Al sign others without his knowing what they were. Harwell then used the guarantees as collateral for loans not only to Stax but also, according to Harwell’s testimony, to fictitious borrowers whose fake accounts he created for his own use. He was sentenced to two and a half years in jail, in addition to the five years he was already serving.
Al had been through the wars, and was thirty-six years old. His detractors, some thought, had achieved their goal despite the court loss. “Al, in fourteen indictments, freed on all charges,” says Jesse Jackson. “But then you’ve got the bloodstains on your clothes. Don’t forget that Dr. King led the Montgomery bus boycott in ’55 and was indicted for income evasion in 1957. The case was designed to slow Dr. King down. Dr. King was taken to the penitentiary about traffic tickets in 1960 and put in a cell with killers. That was a form of breaking people, designed to maim and to slow down and injure, and they did just that. Al Bell was and is a man of integrity.”
After a respite, Al returned to the record business. He became president of Motown Records in the late 1980s, its last days as an independent label, and assisted Berry Gordy in the label’s sale to MCA Records. He founded a new label, Bellmark, that discovered and distributed the song “Whoomp! (There It Is)” by Tag Team; it was certified quadruple platinum for sales over four million. He also worked with Prince, distributing his 1994 hit “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” and coproducing with him the Mavis Staples album Time Waits for No One (which also included contributions from Lester Snell and Homer Banks). Recently, he’s returned to Memphis as chairman of the Memphis Music Foundation, and also launched an online venture, AlBellPresents.com. In 2011, he received the Grammy Trustees Award, the music industry’s highest honor for a nonperformer.
It would be another two years after Stax’s close before the story ended for Johnny Baylor. In October 1976, Baylor won a judgment against the IRS charging that they had improperly seized his money at the airport; a New York federal court ordered the IRS to return over half a million dollars to him, plus an additional $35,000 in interest. Before Baylor received his returned money, the trustee for the Stax bankruptcy put a claim on it to help satisfy the Stax debts, calling the payments to Baylor “fraudulent conveyances” that were intended to keep the money beyond the reach of any Stax creditors.
Baylor stood trial in October 1978, and Al took the stand, saying, “The management of Stax and Baylor had an understanding. It was a handshake deal.” The Union Planters attorney, Wynn Smith, was having none of that, and he set out to prove that Baylor was hiding the money for later retrieval. “You don’t earn two and a half million dollars doing nothing,” Smith reflects. “There was no documentation whatsoever to justify any such payments. There’s no evidence that he ever distributed any product. There wasn’t any basis at all for these payments. I argued to the jury that the whole purpose of this scheme with Johnny Baylor was to take two and a half million dollars out of Stax, free and clear of the huge amount of money that Stax owed.” Smith told the jury, “Al Bell had a laundry service named Johnny Baylor. Johnny Baylor was a bag man for Mr. Bell, but the bag man got caught with bag in hand.”
Baylor, forty-five years old, exhibited no fear on the stand, claiming that the money he received was, in fact, not as much as it should have been. He’d been promised by Bell, he claimed, royalties on all the records he produced, plus a fee for promoting and marketing Stax records. Baylor said he was actually owed about $5 million. “The deal Mr. Bell gave me I would have given him if I had been in his position,” Baylor said, “because if we didn’t make money I wouldn’t make anything.” He said Bell gave him one check for $250,000 but he didn’t cash it because “it wasn’t enough.” He later got a check for $500,000. He claimed that when he was first offered a contract in 1968, he didn’t sign it because it was “real thin.” The next contract was much thicker and thus too complicated to read, so he didn’t sign that one either. The only contract that was just right was an oral one. Baylor, claiming responsibility for the scores of Stax records charted by Billboard magazine, justified his payments from the stand, saying, “I think I made the major contribution [to Stax’s success]. In my opinion I was the difference in Stax being flat and being a major company. I was [as] effective . . . as any record man in this country.”
The jury deliberated only about three hours before determining that Baylor was given the money “with the actual intent to hinder, delay or defraud the creditors of Stax.” The Stax trustee was entitled to over $2.5 million, and Baylor was forced to turn over what Stax money remained—$300,000 in treasury bills “traceable” to the $1 million payment, and $500,000 associated with IRS money returned to Baylor.
Why would Al Bell turn over so much money to Johnny Baylor on behalf of Stax? Only two people really know. Al Bell says it was money earned. Johnny Baylor died in 1986; the official diagnosis was stomach cancer, but word on the street was that a girlfriend had been, for years, putting ground glass into his food.
“Even though he was a rough, tough dude, people ended up loving him,” says Dino. “He cared about people. He suggested to the secretaries that they should speak to Al about the hourly wages. They got a raise. Regardless of the negative things, a lot of good came through him.”
“He didn’t go around all the time with his gun cocked,” says Deanie Parker. “Johnny allowed us to view him from time to time as an everyday guy who liked to have fun, who enjoyed laughing, who had a heart. If he knew someone was in a hardship situation, he would reach in his pocket and pull out money to help. But he could be just the opposite too.”
“He helped me a great deal,” says Willie Hall. “He gave me a chance to produce when I knew nothing about producing. He gave money to people in need. Now that other side—he did have a talent for whooping people.”
No one can deny Baylor’s effectiveness at getting records played, though the legality, morality, and civility of his means were dubious. If, as he claims, he was responsible for the success of “Theme from Shaft,” of “I’ll Take You There,” of “If Loving You Is Wrong,” and the other hits of the period—when those records were selling, Stax was grossing $10-15 million a year. Can one man be worth one quarter of the company’s gross, one half, perhaps, of its profit? What Baylor was paid in this nine-month period was more than Stax’s staggering annual payroll for two hundred employees.
According to the US Court of Appeals’ 1981 ruling against Baylor, “Baylor’s flat $1 million promotional fee compares to industry norms of $60,000 to $70,000 per year.” Rumors abound—blackmail, extortion, a Swiss bank account. Baylor was ruthless, and however he threatened his cohorts, whatever incriminating information he carried (if any) appears to have as much force a quarter century after his death as it did when the former Ranger walked the earth. No one’s talking.
Union Planters National Bank achieved its financial goal, reclaiming slightly more than the $10 million it set out to get on the more than $16 million it was owed by its debtors and swindlers. In the non-Stax Harwell bond claim, the bank was awarded $4.5 million, and the other bond claims were settled at $6.3 million, the bank collecting from its insurance companies. Through novel accounting, that $6.3 million was not taxable. In 1977, Union Planters became one of the largest banks in Tennessee.
Stax’s other nemesis, CBS, managed quite well. It signed the Emotions, the Soul Children, and, most notably, Johnnie Taylor, releasing his “Disco Lady.” The single’s success was so big that the industry had to create a new designation: the platinum record, honoring two million copies sold. (The producer: Don Davis.) CBS was no more accustomed to the workings of the soul circuit than Johnnie was to the corporate record world, and there was a period of adjustment for both parties. Bruce Lundvall, who had become president of CBS Records, was at a company convention, Johnnie’s band onstage vamping, but star attraction Johnnie Taylor was nowhere in sight. Rushing backstage, Lundvall was told that Johnnie wasn’t performing until he got paid. “I ran upstairs,” says Lundvall, “said, ‘Johnnie, get onstage willya!’ He said, ‘I don’t go on until I get paid.’” It took some convincing and, reportedly with no money changing hands, Taylor appeared, winning over the audience and helping build the momentum that brought him the biggest success of his career. Stax was always strong at making money for others.
Memphis often treats its true heroes the way it treats its glorious history. T.O. Jones, the onetime union navy yard worker who tenaciously held to his sense of right and wrong and brought union representation to Memphis’s Department of Public Works, did not fare so well. He never regained control of Local 1733, though he did find employment with the national office through most of the 1970s. By 1976, AFSCME had become the largest union in the state, with the Memphis local led by a longtime sanitation crew chief who’d worked with Jones’s efforts since 1964. Jones retired in the late 1970s, then suffered a series of heart attacks. This man among men spent his last years living impoverished in public housing, surviving on the support of labor leaders who gave him food and money. He died in 1989. As a younger man, he’d brought dignity and respect—humanity, really—to the city’s despised and neglected.
Mayor Loeb did not seek reelection in 1972, and after deciding against a run for the governorship of Tennessee, he retired to Forrest City, Arkansas, where he ran a business selling agricultural equipment. Memphis elected its first African-American mayor, Willie Herenton, in 1991, and he served for eighteen years. Harold Ford served twenty-two years in the House of Representatives and was succeeded by his son, Harold Ford Jr.
Schools in Memphis have never been the same since busing began in 1973. Enrollment in private schools peaked the next year, the number of students and the number of private schools having just about doubled in three years. Private school attendance has held well over the years (census figures showed a dwindling school-age population), but many facilities merged or closed. The Neighborhood Schools of Memphis, run by Citizens Against Busing, had a very short run, failing to reopen in 1974. By 1975, whites in the public schools accounted for less than 30 percent, and their numbers today are about 10 percent. Many whites left the city for the county, and as Memphis has annexed those areas, the nearby towns in Mississippi have grown. At the time of this writing, the public schools are in renewed turmoil, a conflict between rural and urban dwellers, resulting from the redundant, race-based establishment of separate city and county governments.
Poor Isaac Hayes. He’d picked cotton before picking up an Academy Award. Money fell on him like rain, and then the money evaporated. He lost more than everything, because ultimately he lost his copyrights—the right to collect future money for the art he’d created.
Hayes’s downfall was tied to Stax’s inability to fulfill his contract. In January of 1976, after the label had been declared bankrupt, he sued the company and its trustees for $3 million; they were supposed to have given him all his copyrights and master tapes, but they hadn’t, nor had they distributed to him his BMI and ASCAP money—funds the company had received for his radio airplay. Meanwhile, Isaac was missing alimony and child-support payments, and his ex-wife was hitting him with lawsuits. The security firm that protected his studio and his house sued him for $15,000. His clothier sued for $11,000. The IRS seized his Hot Buttered Soul studio, and after his lawyers worked out a deal on the $6 million that he owed, he couldn’t make the first $100,000 payment in July. On November 11, 1976, he filed for bankruptcy. His largest debt among the more than three hundred creditors was to Union Planters National Bank for more than $1.75 million. Others owed included hotels and motels from New York to California, credit cards and department stores—ten grand to Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, another ten to the Saks in Washington, DC. Flower shops, doctors, ex-wives, airlines. His half-million-dollar home was sold on the courthouse steps, scooped up by Union Planters for one hundred grand less than he’d paid for it two years earlier. “Be careful when you take my picture,” he warned journalists on his way into court, referring to the glittering initials “IH” on the corner of his sunglasses. “I don’t want people to think these are diamonds.” Rhinestones. They glitter like real jewelry, but precious they’re not.
Never short of ideas, Isaac released three albums in 1977, two in 1978 (one was archival), and one each in 1979, 1980, and 1981. He could keep the money he earned after the bankruptcy—from a recurring appearance on the TV show The Rockford Files and his other acting work, from the royalties for his collaboration with Dionne Warwick, 1977’s A Man and a Woman, and from his gold-selling album Don’t Let Go, from 1979. When music sales petered out, he became a respected character actor, then regained a place in popular consciousness when he joined the cast of the animated cartoon South Park in 1997 (he’d returned to recording two years earlier . . . with two new albums). His role as Chef on the series proved immensely popular, resulting in an album, Chef Aid: The South Park Album, with several tracks sung by Hayes; one, “Chocolate Salty Balls,” went to number one in the UK. He quit the show in 2005, unhappy over its mockery of the Church of Scientology, of which he was a prominent member.
In 1992, Hayes was made an honorary king of Ghana, in recognition of his efforts to advance civil rights and to honor the African traditions of African-Americans. As king, he was renamed Nene Katey Ocansey the First. Joining him at his coronation were Chuck D. and Flavor Flav from the hip-hop group Public Enemy; they performed together while in Africa. Isaac helped develop the eastern district of Ada, on the Atlantic. His fourth wife, Adjowa, was from there; she had his twelfth child.
Hayes was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, and had recently signed to the revived Stax label when he suffered a stroke in 2006. He recovered well enough to resume touring and working up new material. But in August 2008, while exercising at home on a treadmill, he died of a heart attack. His debts were more than his assets, leaving his estate bankrupt; his million-dollar, seven-thousand-square-foot home was sold at foreclosure. One ray of hope: Recent copyright extension acts may allow his estate to soon regain control of his publishing.
Many of Stax’s artists enjoyed continued careers as singers, entertainers, performers, and producers. Few surpassed their Stax success; in addition to Johnnie Taylor, the Staple Singers had a number-one hit after leaving Stax, “Do It Again.” Rufus Thomas continued performing, always inviting fans onstage to do “The Funky Chicken” with him. Daughter Carla makes occasional appearances, and her long-unreleased cabaret album, Live at the Bohemian Caverns, came out forty years after its 1967 recording, welcome and bittersweet. Marvell Thomas has continued to record and perform, working at various times with Isaac Hayes, William Bell, the Hi Rhythm Section, Peabo Bryson, and the Temptations.
Booker T. & the MG’s have occasionally regrouped since Al Jackson’s murder, initially with Willie Hall on drums, later with Anton Fig, Steve Jordan, and then Memphian Steve Potts (“the Smiling Drummer”). Along the way, Booker, Steve, and Duck joined Levon Helm for his RCO All-Stars band, and Cropper and Dunn were part of the Blues Brothers band (which also featured drummer Willie Hall). The Blues Brothers’ big hit was “Soul Man,” and the album went to number one, introducing a new generation to Stax players and songs. In 1986, Jerry Wexler asked the surviving MG’s to be the house band at Atlantic’s fortieth anniversary celebration. That led to gigging as the house band at Bob Dylan’s Madison Square Garden “Bob-Fest,” which in turn led to them backing Neil Young. With their profile high, the band renewed its own touring and recorded a new album, 1994’s That’s the Way It Should Be. In 2007, they were given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Grammys. Booker and Steve have reignited successful solo careers (Booker has recently taken home two Grammy Awards for Best Pop Instrumental Album; Steve has enjoyed recent nominations).
Rufus Thomas, the World’s Oldest Teenager, had his own parking spot on Beale Street, and a park in Porretta Terme, Italy, is named for him. (University of Memphis Libraries/Special Collections)
Duck Dunn, who recorded with Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, John Prine, and many others after Stax, continued to work with Neil Young after the MG’s tour; he called his Florida home “the house that Neil built.” “Stax was the greatest thing that ever happened to anybody who worked there,” Duck said. “Jim Stewart, I’d love to hug his neck today. He gave me a lot of grief up there in the control room, but he also gave me my life.” One night after a gig in May 2012, while touring with Steve Cropper in Japan, Duck Dunn went to sleep and didn’t wake up. He was seventy years young, full of energy, respectful, irreverent, and funny—all of which was reflected in his playing.
Al Jackson’s murder remains an open case, and police will not comment on it.
Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love worked hard as the Memphis Horns for many years after leaving the Stax payroll, joining the Doobie Brothers, Steve Winwood, Sting, and U2. Their stamp is all over pop music. “Stax was a cosmic happening,” Wayne says. “Little sparks hitting, the fires starting, those records being made. Other people might spout philosophy about being white, being black, but when you saw Wayne and Andrew onstage, you couldn’t imagine that anyone had any trouble down South, ’cause we had so much fun. And we sounded so good together. Between us, we raised six children, put them all through school. The more I lived in that environment of magic happening, the more I believed in it.” The Memphis Horns were given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012, one of the few backing groups to be so honored. Wayne still keeps his trumpet shined. Andrew Love died in 2012 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.
The Bar-Kays have enjoyed a very successful career. By 1976, within their first year of leaving Stax, they were on the pop and soul charts with “Shake Your Rump to the Funk.” From then, well into the 1980s, they were fixtures on the soul charts, occasionally crossing over to pop (“Freak Show on the Dance Floor” comes to mind) and continuing their tradition of wild clothes, energized shows, and party-popping pleasures. James Alexander and vocalist Larry Dodson are the group’s mainstays; Ben Cauley sometimes sits in. Their 2012 single “Grown Folks” captures them in fine form, and they played the 2013 inauguration of President Obama. In 2007, on the fortieth anniversary of the plane crash, Ben Cauley returned for the first time to the lake near Madison, Wisconsin, where his friends died in the waters. At a ceremony commemorating the tragedy, he played his trumpet and sang “Try a Little Tenderness” and “The Dock of the Bay” for the several hundred people who’d gathered. In his sleep, Cauley says, he sometimes still hears the final cries of his friends.
In 1981, on a mid-October day with the weight of winter bearing down, Jim Stewart sipped coffee at his kitchen table while a stream of people he did not know gathered on his fifty-six-acre estate, milling about in preparation for the auction of everything that he owned. The bank was collecting on every last bit of Jim’s personal guaranty. A reporter approached Jim and asked the reason for the sale. “It’s just a real estate sale,” he said. “Why does anyone sell his property? I’m just a private citizen and I have no comment.” Most of the goods would be gone by day’s end. Not long after, the IRS evicted Jim, his wife, and three children during the night.
Jim Stewart’s house, and its contents, about to be auctioned. (University of Memphis Libraries/Special Collections)
In hindsight, it’s easy to say that Jim bet all his chips on a color not on the roulette wheel. The company’s shaky foundation seems obvious, the constant borrowing to finance the next hit—neither the hits nor the borrowing could last. But the stable of artists was still strong, and if Jim gave them the attention they needed, why shouldn’t they resume the hits? What had Jim done for years but produce hits from that studio, with many of those same artists? In the moment, the gamble was not as long as it appears in retrospect. He bet on what he’d built. “The only excuse I can give is that I loved the company,” he told Peter Guralnick. “I thought it was worth saving.”
Epic heroes make epic mistakes. Jim had never done the expected. He’d been told it was unwise to have blacks in the studio, that it was stupid to leave banking. Jim acted from the contradictory heart of humanity: People do things romantic and heroic and regrettable. There may be no sense to it, but the act itself is powerful, emotional, and unforgettable. Jim’s bet turned out wrong, but what if he’d been right? What profound belief he’d expressed! In 1974, he was in the catbird seat, and when he leapt out—a beautiful swan dive—he reserved nothing for his family. He lost all that was his. All the savings, all the future income from his sale of the company. He lost the home, the land, the cars, the furnishings. “By early 1974, I was putting money back into the company to protect my investment,” says Jim. “And that’s what destroyed me. I was wealthy. I had Gulf & Western stock which I had retained from their buyout. I got rid of that and I never cut my losses. I just lost everything.” Slowly, with his wife and kids, he reestablished himself, although he avoided the public eye. With some holdings in his wife’s name, the family’s hard fall had some cushion. A Stax guitarist, Bobby Manuel, would coax Jim into a midtown Memphis recording studio. Manuel, with whom Al and Duck re-formed the MG’s, continued to record Stax alumni and newer artists who retained the grit and authenticity that made Stax great. The music was solid, but the distribution less so.
When the world was saying no, Jim and Estelle said yes. They opened their studio the way they opened their hearts, creating opportunity, embracing possibility. A spirit imbues the Stax songs and performances. It is music with soul. “To know that after forty years people still want to hear Otis and still hear Booker T. & the MG’s, it’s gratifying, very gratifying,” Jim says. “I’m just thankful I was blessed to be a part of that. Stax was a family affair, and I don’t mean me and my sister. That close relationship of struggling brought us together. None of us had any money. All we had was the desire and the will and the ability to make it happen—which we did. At Stax, there was a lot of soul, the inner soul that’s part of all of us. We all gained by sharing that, by respecting our fellow man.”
Jim’s sister Estelle is the only owner who made any money at Stax. “Lots of people think life ends at thirty,” she says. “I started in records at forty. I have to say that my life has been very, very interesting since I was forty.” After Packy’s death, Estelle forged on with Fretone. “I depended on him,” she says. “I almost gave up two or three times. But being around young people, it keeps you thinking.” Estelle, after the death of her beloved son, after what she considered a betrayal by her only brother, renewed herself yet again, thinking her young self back into one of the most successful records to ever come from Memphis, “Disco Duck.” Created by a popular Memphis disc jockey, Rick Dees (along with producer Bobby Manuel and a convenience-store employee who did the duck voice), the song took off on her label. She was familiar with records getting too hot to handle and she flew to California to cut a deal with RSO Records, a label that had remade the careers of both Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees. Within months of its release, “Disco Duck” went gold, then quickly platinum, selling more than two million copies. As Stax was withering, Estelle was again blossoming. “I got back in the business,” she says, “because I had to prove to myself that I knew a little bit more about music than I’d ever been given credit for.”
Estelle continued to do it her way. “She spent all her money chasing that hit,” says her daughter Doris. Then with a new fortune, she spent it how she wanted. “She blew it,” says Doris, describing spending sprees on clothes and home furnishings. “She bought furs.” She sold the apartment complex, and Everett died of pancreatic cancer in 1984. When the money was gone, Estelle worked as a cashier in a cafeteria, ringing up Salisbury steaks, Jell-O molds, and corn-kernel bowls, greeting all the customers as if they were stars. She died at age eighty-five in 2004. “You didn’t feel any back-off from her, no differentiation that you were black and she was white,” Isaac Hayes said at the time of her death. “Being in a town where that attitude was plentiful, she just made you feel secure. She was like a mother to us all.” Her grave site features a shaded bench in memory of “Lady A,” hospitable and open long after she’s left this world.
Memphis didn’t appreciate its musical heritage until Elvis Presley died in 1977. And then it wasn’t the heritage or the music it appreciated, just the money that could be made off it. Elvis had brought blues and soul to white society. When he died, Memphis was flooded with tourists from around the world. Phone lines to the city overloaded and service crashed. Florists completely sold out. Locals were shocked by this response, our provincialism laid bare. Memphis experienced a blues awakening like what W.C. Handy describes in his autobiography. At a rural “dance program” around 1903, Handy’s sophisticated band was asked to allow “a local colored band” to play some of the local music. Handy expresses disdain for the trio’s “disturbing monotony” and was amazed when they finished that “a rain of silver dollars began to fall . . . [There] lay more money than my nine musicians were being paid for the entire engagement. Then I saw the beauty of primitive music. They had the stuff the people wanted.”
What the people wanted. Elvis died and money rushed Memphis. Stax died two years before Memphis’s rain of silver. The Stax building sat empty and shuttered. In 1981, Union Planters sold it to the Church of God in Christ for ten dollars, inserting a clause in the deed that dictated the building’s usage as only for “nonprofit, religious, charitable, educational, scientific, cultural and/or civic purposes.” If the property were used otherwise, ownership reverted to the bank. The church long claimed it was going to build a community center there—what had Stax been other than the greatest possible community center?—and in 1989, the church began tearing down the building. There was community protest, enough that a stop-work order was issued (there was also report of a gas leak, which may have influenced the order). But, in Jim’s words, it was too little too late, and the demolition proceeded, the ending seemingly sealed on this modern-day Greek tragedy. Ben Cauley stood outside the hurricane fence and played a requiem on his trumpet.
June 1991, dedication of historical marker at the Stax site. Ben Cauley remembers what was. (Commercial Appeal/Photograph by Dave Darnell)
“After the close of Stax, and after some time had passed, several years, I would drive back to Memphis, Tennessee, and park across the street from 926 East McLemore, and look at that vacant lot where our hearts once dwelled and see the weeds there, the building gone,” says Al Bell. “I’d see beer cans and what have you on that lot, and ultimately, the historic marker that had been placed there. And I would cry. The tears would run profusely, for it was quite painful to know that all that we had worked for and lived for, there was not even a symbol of that in place. It’s like someone had tried to wipe all of that off the face of the earth. Never to be remembered and never to be recognized.”
The lot stood empty. The movie theater lobby’s tile floor showed through the accumulated dirt, and black-and-white photos of the second Bar-Kays would occasionally blow with the breeze. Visitors rummaged through the detritus looking for souvenirs. One local entrepreneur advertised bricks from Stax, shipping them around the world.
As the millennium turned, an idea began taking hold: Stax had assumed its place in the world, now it was Soulsville’s opportunity. The sound of Soulsville, and the power of Soulsville, had gripped a post–Jim Crow generation in Memphis. Several burgeoning community leaders saw that around the Stax lot, an infrastructure languished: An African-American college, LeMoyne-Owen, was around the corner, and many of the neighborhood’s original, well-built homes still stood. Reaching out to some former Stax leaders, an alliance formed, young and old, white and black, private money and public money. A goal was set: to resurrect not just Stax but all of the neighborhood, Soulsville, with a rebuilt Stax as its beacon. The plan was tri-pronged: A museum to attract outsiders; an academy for neighborhood kids where, after school, they could get homework help and free tutoring; and a neighborhood revitalization plan to remove the blight and strengthen what remained. Stax’s longtime publicist Deanie Parker was hired to helm the project.
The Stax Academy opened in July 2000, three years before the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, demonstrating the project’s emphasis on community. Rufus and Carla Thomas, the label’s seminal hitmakers, were among the first alumni to participate in the academy’s summer music camp. Isaac Hayes, Wayne Jackson, Mavis Staples—numerous alumni have returned to inspire the kids.
The Stax Museum of American Soul Music was built on the Stax lot to the specifications of the original building, using the original blueprints. When you stand outside the Stax Museum, you are standing before a replica of the original building. Inside, it’s different (take a nap at the original Stax and the layout would be changed before you woke), but Studio A is like the original, and the gift shop is where Estelle’s record store was after it moved from the concession stand in the lobby. Inside, the Stax story begins in a transplanted rural church, and as Stax and soul music develop, so does the context of soul music nationally. There are about twenty short films, lots of music and outlandish clothes, plus Isaac’s refurbished gold-plated Cadillac (and the razor kit he used to keep his pate gleaming). The Stax Museum even has a dance floor—now that’s a museum that grooves.
Now, as then, Stax is anchoring a neighborhood. The blight has greatly diminished, there are many newly built homes, and the Stax campus has grown, creating a steady flow of workers and students. Incomes in Soulsville remain low, and there’s more crime there than in some other parts of town. It’s a work in progress, but the signs of progress are clear, and are everywhere. The Stax Academy proved such a thriving entity that in 2005 the Soulsville Charter School was established. It began with sixty sixth graders, adding a grade each year until it became a middle and senior high school that now pulsates the neighborhood. In its early years, to get into the school, students had to be failing or expelled from their regular program; unfortunately, there were plenty of applicants. The school days are long, and part of the reward for good work is getting to make music; suspension from music rehearsal is a punishment. I saw sixth and seventh graders who’d never known that a cello existed playing symphonic arrangements of Stax hits—“Theme from Shaft,” “Knock on Wood,” and others—and it was one of the most moving musical performances I’ve ever experienced. The first two classes have now graduated, with 100 percent of each going to college, including one Ivy League recruit.
When the oasis seemed to have become just a mirage, vitality bloomed again from the site. “One day,” Al Bell continues, “I turned the corner out on McLemore, looked up and saw that marquee. And it impacted me so much until I stumbled off the curb into the streets. And as I looked at that marquee, I began to cry once again. But this time, they were tears of joy. For not only had the original building been replicated and placed there on that corner, but the most important part of the spirit of Stax Records was embodied there in the Stax Music Academy, for everything about Stax as it relates to creativity, as it relates to administrative experiences and knowledge, was all about teaching.
“It was Booker T. & the MG’s that taught these little shoeshine boys called the Bar-Kays how to play music. And it was one artist teaching another. It was one writer teaching another. There were open doors there all the time, where, no matter who you were or what you were, you could walk through those doors and realize an opportunity. Whether you had just been released from jail, or whether someone called you an alcoholic, or whatever the case might be—you could walk in there and somebody cared enough to take you by your hand and teach you and help you. And I saw that there—glorified there—in the Stax Music Academy. And I have not, until this very moment, stopped feeling good about that day and what I experienced in feeling on that day. Because I realized a part of it is still alive. Like Dr. King said, truth crushed to the earth shall rise again.”
Lives were made by Stax, and some lives ruined. The tales and fates of these individuals are, like life, diverse and illogical. The Stax story captures our excitement and fears about change, about race and power, about the struggle to find a voice. But the company’s results—not just its music, but also its social and spiritual achievements, the camaraderie, the rejection of hatred, the unprecedented successes—are life-affirming. Stax is the story of opportunity, the strides that people will make when given the chance, the growth a community can achieve when closed doors open, when closed hearts open. Had Jim, Estelle, and Al listened to the laws of Memphis and the laws of Tennessee, souls in harmony would never have sung. The beautiful music is something that raises us beyond our confines, that invites the spiritual, that takes us there.
