The Ertegun brothers were joined by Jerry Wexler, son of a German-Czech immigrant window washer, who started as a journalist, changed the label race music to rhythm and blues while working for Billboard, and then moved into record production with Atlantic in 1953.
Tom Dowd was, of all things, a nuclear physicist whose career path was curtailed after World War Two because he couldn’t complete his doctorate. His alma mater was still teaching pre-war physics, so Tom ended up in a studio, engineering at first, then building recording desks, producing sessions and mixing some of the all-time great recordings.
At first Stax operated as Satellite Records, founded in 1957 by Jim Stewart, and worked out of a garage, recording country music. To avoid confusion with another operation named Satellite, the name was changed in 1961, Stax being a synthesis of Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton. Around the same time the label moved to the Capitol Theatre, at 926 East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis, a predominantly African-American neighbourhood.
Stewart, a country fiddler, had little interest in R&B, but Estelle’s son Charles, a.k.a. Packy played sax and parlayed his uncle’s recording studio as an entree to a band led by Steve Cropper that morphed, on the back of an instrumental hit called Last Night into The Mar-Keys.
The people at Stax came to the music from an entirely different perspective. Where Motown was aimed squarely at mainstream America, Stax took the course it did more or less by accident.
Money, and the making of large quantities of it, was a motivation, but these people managed to turn a hobby into an income stream.
While Berry Gordy and company were looking for a way out of the ghetto, these guys found themselves in a position where the ghetto was a major element in what was a more or less unanticipated success story.
Jim Stewart ran the recording side of things in the theatre, while Estelle sold records out of the old refreshment stand. Given the demographic of the neighbourhood a move into R&B was, more or less inevitable.
Berry Gordy tailored his product to an external market, while Estelle Axton’s market research consisted of playing test pressings in the record shop then slipping into the studio to point out what the customers were grooving to and asking for more of the same.
As a regional label, Stax needed a national distributor, which turned out to be Atlantic which already covered blues, jazz, the earliest R&B, New Orleans, the whole gamut of black American music. With hits from Ray Charles, the early doo wop groups, and Ben E. King Atlantic, working out of New York with access to the headquarters of the major media networks would have had a head start over a provincial independent like Motown.
When Leiber and Stoller jumped ship from Atlantic to go out on their own with Red Bird Records, faced with a need to fill in a hole in Atlantic’s R&B catalogue where did Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd go? Straight south to Memphis to form an alliance with Stax, where they were able to pick up a whole new set of artists.
Not that this was a one-way street with all the benefits heading north. When Stax started experiencing technical difficulties in their studio Wexler sent Tom Dowd south with instructions to fix the problem, which Dowd did by building them a new eight track desk from the ground up over the weekend.
One of the highlights of Tom Dowd and the Language of Music has Dowd recounting how Rufus Thomas dropped into the newly rebuilt studio on Sunday morning on his way home from church.
Spotting the cars parked outside, he wondered what was going on, learned that the studio had a new desk, so Rufus volunteered a song he’d just come up with as something they might like to use while they were fine-tuning the thing.
The song? Walkin’ The Dog!
Aretha Franklin’s early recording career saw her cast as a jazz singer with Columbia Records, and while she’d cut albums full of sophisticated stuff, she didn’t crack the Top Forty until she’d changed labels and been hauled off to Muscle Shoals to record with the now-legendary session players down there.
A few years later, we saw the perfect example of the difference when Motown relocated out of Detroit and headed west to Hollywood. That was AFTER the Supremes and the Temptations had succumbed to the lure of Las Vegas and the sophistication of the Copacabana.
Stax, on the other hand, stayed in Memphis, although circumstances changed. Atlantic was sold to Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, a renegotiation of the distribution deal saw Stewart lose the rights to the label’s back catalogue and the label was sold to Gulf + Western in 1968 but Stax retained strong links to the same community Motown seemed to be trying to distance itself from.
In itself, Soul Man might seem a relatively isolated incident in the development of Hughesy’s musical taste, but every journey of discovery begins with a single step. This single was one of the first steps on a journey away from the musical equivalent of the safe and comfortable middle Australia I’d grown up in.