Tuesday, 30 November 2010

4. Soul Man - Sam & Dave

Some time in 1966 or early 1967, all the musically aware high school kids I knew trooped off to the Roxy Theatre in Townsville’s main street to catch the feature-length movie version of the something called the T.A.M.I. Show.

We didn’t know much about some of the performers, though there were plenty of names from the Top 40 - Jan & Dean, The Ronettes, Gerry & The Pacemakers for a start - but what really mattered to us was the small fact that the headline act was the Rolling Stones.

That’s what we were there for.

Maybe if we’d been capital city kids it wouldn’t have seemed such a big deal, but there was no way known we were ever likely to get to see the Stones live (or so we thought - the possibility that they would still be on the road forty years later wouldn’t have occurred to us). So off we went, ready, willing and able to sit through some lightweight fluff because at the end of the show we were going to see some authentic rhythm and blues from the Stones.

The rashness and foolishness of uninformed youth....

Forty years later I can’t remember the running order, but Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley were pretty good. We knew them from the Stones connection, and we knew the Motown acts from the radio, so The Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson weren’t a surprise, but there were two staggering performances before the Stones came on.

The first was Ike & Tina Turner.

The second was James Brown.

Of course, we knew something about this soul music. I had an E.P. by the Who and in the liner notes Roger Daltrey had expressed an admiration for Wilson Pickett’s Land Of A Thousand Dances, but the connection between R&B and what we liked to dance to hadn’t been made as far as we were concerned.

If that seems strange, it’s worth remembering that our version of provincial Australia didn’t even have a choice of commercial television stations at the time, and even something like the legendary British show Ready Steady Go would pop up unannounced once in a blue moon on the ABC, so we weren’t likely to be right up to date with the latest groovy dance moves.

Even if we had been, there was no way we were likely be doing anything but gently hopping from one foot to the other facing whichever girl we’d managed to coax out of her seat to join us on the dance floor. Anything more extreme would have been a sign of total degeneracy, and at the ripe old age of fifteen, fitting in with the peer group was paramount.

So even if we’d heard something like Ike & Tina, all we would have heard was the beat. There was no way we would have anticipated the total frenzy that burst onto the screen when Tina and the Ikettes sashayed onto the screen and proceeded to strut their stuff at what seemed like a million miles an hour.

After relative normality had briefly been returned with the Supremes, there was this madman named James Brown.

Years later I was reading the introduction to a book called Nowhere To Run by Gerri Hirshey,

The writer was describing an interview with Michael Jackson about the time Thriller was being completed. The Gloved One, being a few years younger than the writer asked if she’d seen, or could help him locate, that 1965 teen special that captured the most mind-bending exhibition of dance hoodoo ever recorded, footage that even Elvis Presley watched over and over tucked away in Graceland.

And that’s what we saw that night in the Roxy in Townsville, a display of sheer energy, exuberance, showmanship and stamina that totally blew us away. Not that we were alone in that respect.

The highlight of the whole thing was the collapse at the end of the final number. Seemingly exhausted, Brown slumped to the floor, and a bevy of underlings emerged from the wings with a dressing gown, the way the guys in his corner swoop on a beaten boxer at the end of a fight, but Brown wasn’t finished. With the band still playing, he burst free, came back for another burst, collapsed, was led off again and repeated the routine until he finally condescended to leave the stage.

And the Rolling Stones had to follow THAT.

You might, based on what is written here, start to search for the footage of James Brown’s performance, and you might even find a DVD called That Was Rock which features part of the footage from the TAMI and TNT Shows. However you’ll be disappointed. For some reason, while Out Of Sight and Night Train are on the disk, they’ve neglected to include the fading boxer footage.

Of course, there’s always YouTube, where you can find Night Train, Please, Please, Please (with the fading boxer routine, cut back and forth between two performances) and there was what looked like the whole of the Ike & Tina Turner set from the Big TNT Show until a copyright claim by Dick Clark Productions, Inc. meant it’s no longer available.

Of course there’s a huge pile of film and television footage languishing in someone’s vaults waiting for DVD release.

Dave Clark from the Dave Clark Five reputedly bought the rights to Ready Steady Go years ago, and although bits and pieces came out on video in the eighties (including a great Motown special) there’s no DVD release. That doesn’t mean they’re not out there in some form, but a box set covering the full run of shows rather than someone’s selected highlights would be something worth looking for.

Which brings us to the TV show that links us into the theme I’m labouring towards here.

Now Time screened on the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1968. There were thirteen half-hour episodes cram packed with the latest stuff from Swinging London, though I suspect that the footage was drawn from a variety of sources, which would explain the lack of a handy DVD set. The series being in black and white might also have something to do with the matter.

There were film clips which would fit right in with the current generation of music videos, sequences which seemed to have been shot specifically for the series, and excerpts from other films which hadn’t quite made it out our way.

While the footage of the Vanilla Fudge’s You Keep Me Hanging On may have been live or may have been mimed in a studio somewhere, there wasn’t much doubt about the live credentials of the stuff that had been lifted from a European tour by the Stax/Volt Revue in 1966.

Tom Dowd had headed a transatlantic expedition featuring Booker T & the MGs, the Mar-Keys, Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding and Sam & Dave which was greeted like royalty when it touched down in London and proceeded around Europe.

In Tom Dowd And The Language of Music Mr Dowd recounts how the participants were feted by the British pop aristocracy, and tells of his amazement that the Beatles were still working on four-track recorders when even the Stax studio in Memphis had gone to eight.

Somewhere in the process one (at least) of the concerts was filmed and parts of it were scattered through the thirteen episodes of Now Time along with the Small Faces, Pink Floyd and a host of others I can’t recall thirty-eight years later.

However there was one act I have never been able to forget. Of course, when the same footage that was used in Now Time turns up in one of those documentary series about popular music in the second half of the twentieth century fading memories are revived, but a first sight of Double Dynamite a.k.a. Sam & Dave was something that was emphatically NOT to be forgotten.

Remember that by this stage I’d actually seen James Brown in action, and Otis Redding, at least, from the Stax/Volt Revue had also surfaced on Now Time but these two slightly built jack-in-the-boxes had their own dynamism.

Otis Redding strutted, stamped and pleaded to the audience, but stayed more or less in one place. James Brown worked the stage, and there was no one who could move in quite the same way, but these two little guys were something else. I don’t recall whether their singles had received much airplay in Australia, but I do have the feeling that Hold On I’m Coming, at least, was pretty well-known.

And when Soul Man came out in 1968, it went straight to the top of my personal ratings because I could visualise what it would have looked like on stage. The opening riff from Steve Cropper, the call and response, the dance steps, the whole package.

By that stage there was plenty of Motown played on the radio - mainly the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye and the Supremes. I don’t recall much by the Temptations though I think they’ve aged better than their contemporaries (that might also be a function of lower visibility in the Top 40).

You got to hear Aretha, Otis and the Wicked Pickett from time to time as well, so there wasn’t anything novel about soul, R&B or whatever you wanted to call it. It was popular, danceable, and you even got to see some of those acts on TV. But something about Sam & Dave set them apart from the other Stax/Volt artists and the Atlantic soul.

There was also a huge gulf between the Stax/Volt/Atlantic records and what was coming out of Motown.

Compared to the funkier soul stew coming out of Memphis (and to some extent New York) Motown fitted far more easily into the mainstream. That’s hardly surprising when you look at the origins of the two labels.

Berry Gordy, ex-boxer, moderately successful songwriter and founder of Tamla-Motown was looking for mainstream acceptance, and Motown acts were fine-tuned to present something that looked good on stage, sounded great and could be transposed into areas that wouldn’t normally be open to black Americans. In the middle of racial unrest, the Vietnam War, and the emergence of Black Power, Motown was the face of an emerging black middle class, with hopes and aspirations that weren’t too different from those of white America.

Or at least that’s how it seemed, and while you got the occasional track that offered some social commentary, it almost seemed like the label was acting out of a sense of obligation to be seen making a comment rather than a feeling of outrage at the way events were developing. Which also probably explains why we kept hearing Motown tracks on the radio in Australia while other labels and other acts moved deeper into the ghettos.

Motown was coming out of the industrialised north-east, and reading about the label there’s a sense of locality. Most of the acts seemed to be drawn from the same geographic area, even from the same neighbourhoods. The Supremes, for example, were three local teenage girls who spent ages hanging around Hitsville USA before they got the chance to step onto the escalator that took them to the top of the pops.

Like all Motown acts, they were groomed - fitted out to look the part, choreographed to the nth degree so that the whole thing looked sophisticated when stuck in front of gorgeous grooves from the Funk Brothers.

The artists recording for Stax, Volt, Atlantic and the other labels that fall under that umbrella came from a more diverse background. Otis Redding came out of Georgia, Wilson Pickett had memories of picking cotton in conditions that hadn’t changed much since the end of slavery. While Aretha Franklin was a preacher’s daughter from the industrial north-east, her sound, once she moved to Atlantic was coming from the revival tents of the deep South as much as from her dad’s church in downtown Cleveland - not that there would have been a great distance between the two in reality.

A bigger distance lay in the ethnic backgrounds of the people at the top of the two camps.

Motown, based in Detroit, drew most of its performers, players, writers and consultants from the same area, and was virtually an all-black affair. White America didn’t play any part in the operation until the records, manufactured for acceptance as The Sound of Young America made their way into the market place. The labels that came under the Atlantic umbrella were an entirely different kettle of fish.

The people at the top of the tree on the Atlantic side of the fence were, on the other hand, almost exclusively white - and in many cases were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. Atlantic founder Ahmet Ertegun was the son of the Turkish ambassador to the USA, who had fallen in love with black American music after seeing Cab Calloway in London in the thirties, and teamed up with Herb Abramson, the former artists-and-repertoire director for National Records, to form Atlantic Records in 1947.

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.