Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records by Bowman Rob; Bowman Robert M.;

Author:Bowman, Rob; Bowman, Robert M.; [Bowman, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4886711
Publisher: Music Sales
Published: 2010-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Jesse Jackson, Isaac Hayes, and AI Bell outside the back of the Stax studio and offices at 926 E. McLemore Avenue. COURTESY DEANIE PARKER.

Jackson played several roles in the Stax story. Besides his recordings on Respect, he was one of three hosts at 1972’s Wattstax extravaganza, and would attempt to rally support for the label in its dying days. Stax, in turn, supported both Operation Breadbasket and later Jackson’s splinter organization, Operation PUSH, in a variety of ways, including “donating” the services of several of its bigger artists at the annual PUSH EXPO, a business and cultural exposition, and donating and lending large sums of money to the organization. When Stax went bankrupt, PUSH owed the record label $100,000.

At the time of the release of I Am Somebody, Al Bell was quoted in a company press release as saying that with the Respect label “We are attempting to document with recordings outstanding black people in all fields. We want to preserve history on wax so that young people will be able to hear and feel the words, rather than just read them and not understand the man who uttered them.”

Jackson recorded one subsequent album on Respect, 1974’s Pushing On (Holy Day/Memphis, U.S.A.).8 John KaSandra recorded four of the other five albums released on the label. KaSandra was a journeyman artist who had recorded as part of two different doo-wop groups, the Cherokees and the Cuff Links. He had also written Bobby Blue Bland’s 1964 hit “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do,” recorded for Imperial Records, written and produced for Ray Agee and Lou Rawls, and recorded two jazz-tinged albums for Capitol before signing with Stax. With four LPs and three singles to his credit, KaSandra was the most recorded artist on Respect. As was true with everything released on Respect in this period, none of his recordings made much of an impact in the marketplace.

Radical Detroit journalist and broadcaster Jim Ingram recorded the remaining Respect album, Drumbeat, released in 1974. Besides writing most of the material on the record, Ingram narrated, sang (exceedingly flat!), and played congas through a mixed bag of instrumentais, politically and socially charged narratives, and the spiritual “Walk Around Heaven.” His one Stax release came to the company through a master purchase deal with Detroit deejay Al Perkins.9

It is ironic that, while Stax was marketing its first release on Respect, the company was experiencing internal problems with respect, much of the fallout being racially tinged. On March 14, 1970, Jim Stewart addressed a company meeting. The ostensible reason for the meeting was to institute a new corporate structure that included introducing new controller Ed Pollack.

In his five-page prepared speech, Stewart addressed a number of other issues beyond Stax’s new corporate structure. After noting that 1969 had been an incredibly successful year for the company in which the number of employees had grown from twenty to sixty, the left-field success of Hot Buttered Soul had given the label its first gold album, and studio facilities had been expanded, Stewart declared: “It was a year of many improvements and accomplishments and yet, we failed.

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