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Published: October 26th 2008
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The Fellas Outiside the Stax Museum
after Ips and I had dropped some coin in the gift shop. Suggested Listening for this Entry: "Starting All Over Again" by Mel and Tim. "Who's Making Love" by Johnnie Taylor. "Walk on By" and "Theme from Shaft" by Isaac Hayes, a clip of which is included below.
Suggested Food and Drink for this Entry: No food, just a forty of Schlitz Malt Liquor. (Unfortunately, Rufus Thomas' ad for Schlitz Malt Liquor isn't available on YouTube.)
After the events late 1967 and early 1968, Stax found itself in a dire position and change was in order. The company was sold to Gulf and Western, co-founder Estelle Axton left the company and her brother Jim Stewart assumed a lesser role at Stax. At the same, Al Bell, Stax’s sales director assumed control of operations at Stax. Bell, an African American, had a different vision for the company. He wanted a move away from the family atmosphere that had been prevalent at Stax toward a business focused directly on making records for the black community.
Not long after the break with Atlantic, Johnnie Taylor gave Stax a major hit with his recording of “Who’s Making Love”. The record’s sales gave Stax a capital base to undertake one of the most ambitious recording projects in music history. As mentioned in the last entry, when Atlantic Records broke its distribution deal with Stax, Stax was left with no product to sell. All the recordings that had been distributed by Atlantic became property of Atlantic.
To remedy the problem of not having a readily available product for sale, Al Bell brought forth a plan in which Stax would release twenty-eight albums on one day and follow the release with a massive marketing effort. Work on these LPs began immediately with twenty-seven of the LPs being ready for the release date in 1969. Among the LPs in this massive release, was
Hot Buttered Soul by Isaac Hayes. The album would break Hayes onto the national scene and lead to him becoming Stax’s biggest star as the 1970s neared.
With the success of
Hot Buttered Soul and the other releases of 1969, Al Bell sought to grow Stax beyond the traditional recording business. In 1970, Bell and Stewart bought the company back from Gulf and Western. With a roster of artists that then included the Staples Singers, blues great Albert King, and even Richard Pryor for a time, Stax became a runaway train with no direction as the label took on various projects. The company began to hemorrhage cash and the staff increased in size with no oversight as to its spending.
Two projects marked Stax’s zenith in the early 1970s. In 1971, the movie
Shaft was released by MGM with an accompanying soundtrack released on Stax Records’ Enterprise label. Isaac Hayes won the first Academy Award won by an African-American in a non-acting category when won he brought home the award for Best Original Song for his recording of “Theme from Shaft”.
On August 20, 1972, Stax Records held the Wattstax Concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Watts riots. The concert featured the majority of the Stax roster of performers and had a ticket price of one dollar. Over 100,000 people attended the concert which was filmed for a 1973 theatrical release.
In 1973, Stax entered in a distribution deal with CBS/Columbia Records in an attempt to once again market its nationally outside the African-America market. The deal made on a handshake between Al Bell and Columbia Records president Clive Davis would soon turn into a near repeat of the Atlantic deal when Davis was fired by Columbia. Columbia soon reneged on the deal leaving thousands of Stax records idle in Columbia warehouses with Columbia refusing to pay Stax for the records.
Meanwhile, several other murky deals had been made by Stax. It was soon discovered, as new management took over Union Planters Bank, that Stax was over ten million dollars in debt to the bank. Accusations of fraud begin to fly at the bank loan officer who oversaw the Stax account and at Stax’s management. Soon, IRS and grand jury probes began, deepening Stax’s problems even more. And, while all this was going on, Jim Stewart continued to invest personal wealth to keep the company afloat. In September 1975, Al Bell and the Union Planter’s loan officer were indicted on charges they conspired to obtain fraudulent bank loans. The loan officer plead guilty to separate charges of fraud, while Bell was never convicted.
On January 13, 1976, federal marshals closed the Stax facility per orders from a bankruptcy judge and the Stax era came to an end. Stewart was left nearly broke. Al Bell, after avoiding conviction, continued to work in the recording industry for other labels.
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