Black Moses by Mark Ribowsky

Author:Mark Ribowsky [Ribowsky, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642938876
Publisher: Permuted
Published: 2022-03-02T14:03:54+00:00

Inured as Ike was to him, Johnny had begun affectionately calling him “Moses”—which Jet magazine editor Chester Higgins had expanded into “Black Moses” in articles about the man he also called a “strutting, virile peacock”—and Baylor’s glaring eyes were aimed even at those on tour with Ike. This included Marvell Thomas. During a rehearsal before a show in Cleveland, Thomas took offense at Baylor pinching one of the three backup singers on the ass. Ike said nothing, but Thomas, from behind his keyboard, told Johnny, “Get your silly ass off the stage.” Not used to sass, Baylor whipped out his gun and held it to Thomas’s head. Petrified but not shrinking, Thomas said later that he challenged him to pull the trigger or get off the stage, whereupon Baylor backed off. But not long after, Thomas was fired by Ike, which left a bad taste in his mouth; after having helped steer Ike’s solo career, Thomas quit Stax and became musical director for his sister Carla, who also fled the label, and later Etta James and Peabo Bryson.

Baylor went even further with another in Ike’s circle, Johnny Keyes, who had written Clarence Carter’s soul hit “Too Weak to Fight” and had recently bought Estelle Axton’s Satellite record store from her son Packy, the original Mar-Keys sax man. After becoming friendly with Ike, Keyes began going on the road as his stage manager, but his spending became a problem. Ike and his retinue flew to New York in January 1970 for a benefit show that Ike and other acts played for free at New York’s Hunter College for the Soledad Brothers, three Black inmates charged with killing a white guard at Soledad Prison. Ike called the brothers “political prisoners” and told the press, “This is where I’m at. I’m not the turn-the-other-cheek kind of person, no. But I believe in using tact and intelligence.”

However, he exercised neither when Keyes asked him for some kind of payment, saying later that while Ike could “donate” his money, Keyes, who had no similar financial comforts, had no reason to donate his. Rebuffed, Keyes then went on a spending spree at the hotel, charging room service and other benefits to Ike’s account. When Ike learned of this, he told Baylor, “Man, handle it any way you want to handle it.” Baylor and Woodard then barged through Keyes’s door as he was partying with the Movement girls. As the women scrambled in terror out of the room, the two thugs pounded Keyes with nine-millimeter pistols, leaving him bleeding profusely and hiding under the bed. Barely able to move, he pulled the phone down and called friends who took him to safety, not to return to Memphis for weeks, after which he quickly sold the record shop and moved to Chicago, free of Baylor and the madness around Isaac Hayes.

Ike, who took these “interventions” with barely a shrug, would euphemistically refer to Baylor and Woodard as no more than necessary evils, saying that his mooks merely “corrected” promoters’ rip-offs with “gangster stuff” that “protected me.

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