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.