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BIRTH OF STAX
By Robert Gordon
Elvis Presley made the record business seem so easy. After his meteoric rise up the charts, everyone in Memphis wanted to get in the game -- including Jim Stewart, who in 1957, when the onetime Memphis truck driver was establishing his movie career, founded Satellite Records, the company that would soon become Stax.
Stax's humble origins were at a barbershop. Jim Stewart's barber explained music industry basics to him, and they even made some recordings in a garage before Jim set up a studio in a vacated grocery store outside Memphis. His experience there taught him two valuable lessons: you can't record next to a railroad track (too much clatter and rumble); and "If you build it they will come," but not if it's too far out in the country.
Despite these early stumbles, Jim was serious about starting a label. While obtaining his business degree, he took music classes and confirmed that he had a pretty good ear. At night he played fiddle in a country swing band, and in his ongoing efforts to discover the next Elvis, convinced his sister, Estelle Axton, to put up the money to get the company off the ground. She took out a second mortgage on her house for $2,500 and became his partner. With this capital, the company acquired an Ampex recorder, some microphones, and other gear. When they received news that the Satellite moniker was already in use, the siblings created a new name, Stax, from the first two letters of each of their last names, pleased with its connotation: stacks of records.
The success of Stax had everything to do with its new location, an old movie theater on an unassuming corner, McLemore Avenue and College Street, in South Memphis. The neighborhood was transitioning from white to black and most of the label's early stars simply walked in the front door and were given auditions by the open-minded and open-eared founders. The new location had been discovered by guitarist Chips Moman, who was then Jim Stewart's right-hand man. In less than a decade, he would be running one of the most successful labels of all time, American, where hits were recorded on everyone from Elvis to Neil Diamond, Dusty Springfield to Herbie Mann. It's likely Moman was drawn to the area because Hi Records, then having instrumental hits with the Bill Black Combo (and later home to Al Green), was located about a mile away, also in a converted movie theater.
Soul music has many definitions, but I like to think of it as a bridge -- the common ground discovered between black and white cultures, expressed in music. These two musical fronts converged at Stax. The Mar-Keys were an all-white band that included Estelle's son (Jim's nephew) Charles "Packy" Axton on sax. These guys -- all teenagers -- were anxious to help Jim learn to operate a studio. They were also ready employees for Estelle's burgeoning Satellite Record Shop, which she established in the theater's concession stand. Aspiring black musicians who came into the shop to buy the latest sounds quickly learned that the studio behind the curtain offered them a chance to make the latest sounds. It was over the record counter that Mar-Keys guitarist Steve Cropper began talking with keyboardist Booker T. Jones, a dialogue that would soon lead to the formation of Booker T. & the MG's, one of soul music's strongest, most successful bands.
Top banner photos: Rev. Jesse Jackson and Isaac Hayes at Wattstax (photo courtesy of the Saul Zaentz Company), Stax Records marquee, and Stax founder Jim Stewart.
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Al Bell, former owner of Stax Records. |
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Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers. |
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Pre-order the DVD. |
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