Respect Yourself

Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Booker T & the MGs (with Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn), Carla & Rufus Thomas, Eddie Floyd, Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, Luther Ingram

Over a period of about fifteen years, from 1960 to the mid-1970s, Stax Records had all these artists, pioneering a unique funk and soul sound and, in its early years blending white and black musicians and executives in the most unlikely of places, segregated Memphis, Tennessee.

The story is well-told by Robert Gordon in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (2013) with a foreword by Booker T Jones.  It's a story with a first act and a second act with the first act being the more compelling.

  (Booker T)  It started with Jim Stewart, an aspiring country-music musician who wanted to get in on the growing music recording business in the late 1950s and his sister, Estelle Axton, who  loved music, all types of music.  They came up with the name of their label by combining the first two letters of their last names.  With very little money they purchased their initial recording equipment and rented a closed movie theater which they converted into a recording studio and expanded the ticket office and made it into a record store, run by Estelle. According to Gordon:

The store would be a way to gauge what shoppers were buying, would provide immediate customer response to new and developing songs, and would yield a working library so writers and musicians could keep current.  The initial purpose was plain and simple: cash flow to help pay the rent.

     (Estelle & Jim)
At the time when there was no set template for the record industry or recording labels and to the extent there was any developing template Stax didn't follow it.  There were no union studio musicians, no charts developed before recording sessions; they were making it up as they went along.

What's remarkable is how young everyone was.  What became the core of the studio musical team, Booker T, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, The Bar-Kays and the Mar-Keys were all in high school when they started working at Stax and Booker T and Cropper, in particular, became executives, managing the recording process while still in their teens.

          Gordon entertains us as he tells of how Jim and Estelle became the promoters of soul music and of the growth of Stax from its first hits Walking the Dog by Rufus Thomas and Green Onions by Booker T & the MGs to Cropper and Wilson Pickett writing Midnight Hour in a room at the Lorraine Motel to that magic moment when Otis Redding showed up and changed the destiny of Stax.

Steve Cropper:

He put a spark under Stax.  No question about it  . . . Otis Redding was the one artist that everybody looked forward to recording with.

  (Cropper)
Booker T:

Otis Redding seemed to be a person with a mission and we picked up that mission and it became all of ours.  His intent was so strong and so powerful when we were recording that it translated to more than the music.  

It was Redding who made the break through to a white audience at the Monterrey Pop festival in July 1967 and late that year he and Cropper wrote the song that he was certain would be his first Number One, (Sittin' On) The Dock of The Bay (for the full story see Sittin' In The Morning Sun).  Here's Otis at Monterrey (and stick around for the last minute of the video):

And it was Redding's death (along with most of the Bar-Kays) when his plane crashed into Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin in December 1967 that was the first of three events over six months that transformed Stax and signaled the closing of the curtain on its first act.  Released soon after his death, The Dock of The Bay became one of the best selling singles of 1968.

The second was the revelation of the awful distribution agreement Jim Stewart had entered into with Atlantic Records back in 1965.  Stewart had entered into it without consulting a lawyer.  Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic producer claimed he didn't read it either but there is room for doubt.  In any event, when Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun sold Atlantic it turned out that the contract gave Atlantic control of Stax's masters destroying the economic value of the Stax catalogue.

The third was the murder of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in April 1968.  Throughout Respect Yourself, Gordon weaves the story of race relations in Memphis and, in particular, of the struggle of the black sanitation workers to gain respect and have their unionization efforts recognized by white politicians.  This struggle, which had gone on for several years, was what brought King to Memphis.
    (King in Memphis)
Stax had been an oasis amidst the racial strife.  The one place in Memphis where blacks and white could work together.  Booker T and the MGs was unique, two black and two white musicians.  In the introduction, Booker T writes of Jim Stewart's hiring of a black man, Al Bell, as an executive at Stax:

It was 1965 in Memphis, Tennessee, the heart of the American South.  Throughout this wide region, race mixing was nothing short of an assault on the social realm.  Inside Stax Records, whites and blacks had worked side by side for half a decade.  People who couldn't publicly dine together were making beautiful music, that the public - black and white - loved to hear.  Many times, however they'd step outside the studio and white cops would stop to check on the whites' safety, to hassle the blacks.

One telephone and one desk.  While Al situated himself, Jim made a call.  When he hung up, Al watched as Jim slid that phone across the desk, toward him.
(Al Bell & Jim Stewart)
Al Bell made his call.  When done, like his boss, he slid the phone back across the desk.  It was such a quotidian act, yet revolutionary in 1965. . . In Memphis, thirty three African American men had been recently fired from the sanitation department for fomenting strike talk . . . the City of Memphis defied integration orders by closing its public swimming pools - for two consecutive hot summers - rather than having blacks and whites share the same water.

"I was amazed to sit in the same room with this white guy who had been a country fiddle player", says Al . . . "The spirit that came from Jim and his sister Estelle Axton allowed all of us, black and white, to come off the streets, where you had segregation and the negative attitude, and come into the doors of Stax, where you had freedom, you had harmony".

King's death changed it all.  The distrust and anger overwhelmed all of the city, including Stax.  THC encountered the way attitudes were impact.  About 20 years ago he managed a team based in Memphis and one of the group was a white Memphis native born in the 1930s who told THC that "things wouldn't be right in Memphis" until the day when everyone, white and black, who was there the day King was murdered had themselves died.  

For Stax it meant changes in the working relationships, in the management and even in the sound of the music.  Over time Estelle Axton and Steve Cropper left and Al Stewart was bought out and the management became explicitly focused on a black audience.  There were some great successes, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers being two of the biggest, but Stax ultimately overexpanded, got out of financial control was finally went bankrupt.  In a sad note, Jim Stewart, who had walked away with enough to make him financially sound for the rest of his life, came back at the end and pledged all his personal assets to help keep Stax afloat.  When it went bankrupt he lost everything. 

(Isaac Hayes)  The second act of Respect Yourself is well told but it is essentially a sad and dreary story after the uplifting first act.  But we all still have the music and we'll leave you with Hold On, I'm Coming by Sam & Dave, written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter and you can read Respect Yourself for the story of how the song ended up with its title.