Of Memphis, Soulsville & Cabbies

I’m really looking forward to the Whole Wide World this Friday night. I always do. But this time, it’s different. I’m hosting! After Rita’s great Motown show, I thought the southern capital of soul needed equal time. So here’s what we’re gonna do: 3 solid hours of the sounds of Stax, for the 50th birthday of this legendary record label.

The idea for this show started a few months back, over a long weekend in Memphis. My wife Nancy had a conference at the Peabody Hotel, and I tagged along. I’d been to Memphis once, in the late 90s. It’s my favorite address in American music, the crossroads of blues, country, gospel, R&B, soul, jazz, rock and roll.

The Peabody’s a classic old hotel, right downtown, couple of blocks above Beale. Lansky’s tailor shop is in the lobby, “Clothier to the King.” The walls are filled with signed guitars from all kinds of country and rock legends. While I was browsing pork pie hats, the salesman said we’d just missed Johnny Rotten on a shopping spree.

Last time, I did see a few landmarks. Graceland (well, just the car museum), Sun Studios (Sam Phillips happened to be there), and the National Civil Rights Museum. That’s a very moving experience, on the site of the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was shot. Moving and creepy.

Ten years ago, downtown Memphis was a hard luck story. Over the decades, they’ve tried to bring people back and turn the city’s deep music heritage into a tourist attraction. The results have been mixed.

There’s a new minor league ballpark, NBA team, a big honking mall has been welded onto the Peabody’s backside, and a crop of new museums. Beale Street’s become a kind of music history theme park. The original BB King’s is there, plus Isaac Hayes’s club, Gibson Guitar Factory and Lounge, and a load of small clubs and restaurants. Then there’s the gorgeous old Orpheum Theater. If you want to celebrate Stax’s 50th on location, Booker T., Isaac Hayes, William Bell, Eddie Floyd, Mabel John, Rance Allen and a load of other Stax vets are playing there on June 22. Closer to home, Booker T. and the MG's are playing the River to River Festival in NYC on June 13

Beale has a lot of bustle, but step a couple blocks off W.C. Handy’s famous street and downtown Memphis is still pretty darned desperate. Empty ladies wear and shoe stores with forlorn signs in the windows “celebrating our 75th year in 2006,” an abandoned Hungarian restaurant. Walking deserted streets in business hours, past bombed-out office building shells, I say to Nancy that downtown Memphis looks like Dresden after the bombing. The next day, the Commercial Appeal writes that a city council member has gotten in hot water for saying the same.

Some storefronts are familiar, even if you’ve never been. Places like The Rendezvous (as in “At least we can get us a decent meal, down at…”), or the shell of radio station WDIA, where BB King and Rufus Thomas got their start as deejays. Signs of impending gentrification are mixed in—office conversions to condos, the exclusive new eatery with the pricey prix-fixe and a trendy variation on red velvet cake.

We planned to do a few things together. I wanted to take Nancy to the civil rights museum and Sun Studios, and we had to do Graceland. But I also had some time to myself, and I wanted to get to Soulsville.

I couldn’t have gone there in 1998 if I’d wanted to. The Stax studios were a rubble-filled lot, one of the saddest thoughts in music history. After the label went bankrupt in the mid 70s, the studios became a church, and then were torn down, in spite of community protests. All that was left was one of those cast iron historical markers by the curb.

In the nearly 10 years since I’d been here, people had raised money and created a replica of the old building. This concerned me a bit; more evidence of Memphis as theme park. But I’d heard good things about Soulsville (not to be confused with the Memphis Rock N’ Soul Museum, part of the Smithsonian), so Stax was at the top of my list.

The next morning, I put on my walking shoes, packed a bottle of water, and headed for the concierge to ask for directions. How far? Could I walk? The concierge (also the hotel’s Duckmaster) (don't ask, unless you have kids or a pathological love of the Cute) paused, and looked me up and down. It was a few miles, he said, and he should call me a car. I agreed, and violated my own first rule of taxi travel in any city. Know the fare. But it’s Memphis; how much can three miles cost?

A little while later, a late model Explorer pulled up out front. My driver, Faye, would have made a very convincing R&B singer from the early 70s. Great style (black to match the Explorer), talkative, lots of southern warmth. Faye picked up a couple of passengers at a nearby hotel, and we headed for the interstate. We got to talking about Soulsville, and I mentioned that I thought I could walk there. She told me the concierge probably didn’t want me walking there on my own. “I grew up there, and that’s the hood, baby. Memphis is better these days, but we still have a lot of murders down there." O-kay.

Faye pointed out the house where Aretha was born, and wheeled around a couple of corners to pull up in front of 926 McLemore Avenue. Overall, the street looked pretty tired. Empty lots, a rundown market across the street (I remember this as the "Wu Tang Superette"). Soulsville was definitely off the tourist trail.

There it was—that iconic marquee. Sure enough, this was no lot full of bricks, but an exact replica of the old theater that Jim Stewart and his sister/partner Estelle Axton bought in the 50s. (After Estelle refinanced her house to pay for it, they rejiggered the movie house into studios. Estelle took over the candy stand for the Satellite Record Shop, after the label’s original name. Satellite became Stax, STewart + AXton = Stax in 1959.)

Faye asked if I wanted her to pick me up in a couple hours. I said sure, and pulled out my wallet. 42 bucks. Huh? Plus tip. (It was $26 for two from the airport to the Peabody.) I got in the door, thought the better of it, and called Faye to cancel. Thanks, I’ll grab a bus.

The teenager who was taking admission charged me $8.50 with an AAA membership. I would have paid 42 bucks for this. That cab fare sting was starting to wear off, and the museum began grabbing my attention. It wouldn’t let go for three hours, and I could have stayed a week.

It started with the usual museum history video. But from there on, it was like going to church. Literally. After the video, you step into a 100 year-old Mississippi country chapel they’ve jammed whole into the museum. Photos, videos and sound take you into that church and trace the roots of soul in the black churches and Jubilee gospel quartets. I couldn’t stop watching a video loop of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, electric guitar rockin’ the congregation on 50s black and white TV.

This was just the start. Outside the doors, McLemore Ave might have looked pretty desperate. But inside Soulsville there was a party going on (at least during museum hours), and all the ghosts of Memphis’s high times were dancing.

The collection is rich, full of soul artifacts. Room after room of tributes to Stax greats-- Otis, Sam & Dave, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Booker T, the Bar-Kays. Stage outfits from Mavis and Otis. Isaac Hayes’s Cadillac on a turntable, forever spinning like some immense LP. Saxes and trumpets from the Mar-Keys and Memphis Horns. It’s just mind blowing to think about how much music came out of this building. Or a building that looked like it. Does it matter? It’s fun, but also melancholy, to stand inside the rebuilt Studio A in front of Steve Cropper’s fender amp and Booker T’s Hammond, listening to control room talk and outtakes.

Soulsville U.S.A. mixes this single label focus and a general history of Soul. There are exhibits on Motown and Muscle Shoals, but I only had so much time, and after all, when in Memphis... If all this doesn’t convince you of Stax’s importance, the record room will finish the job. Every Stax 45, every album, arranged in release order. A bit of an obsessive-compulsive nightmare. But also a reminder of how wide the Stax catalog was in the 60s and 70s-- Big Star and Billy Eckstine, Richard Pryor and Black Oak Arkansas.

The icing on this slice of red velvet cake was a temporary photo exhibit by the late jazz bassist Milt Hinton. Hinton always had a camera with him, and that they gave him access to relaxed shots of the unbelievable people he played with over the decades. Classic, exquisite shots of Diz and Bird, Miles, Cab Calloway, Coleman Hawkins, Sinatra. Billie Holiday in all the sadness of her last sessions. Musicians on the road, enduring Jim Crow laws at restaurants, water fountains, motels.

I browsed the gift shop, where Estelle Axton’s old Satellite Record Shop used to sit. The young woman at the front desk called me a cab. I waited under the marquee, watching life on McLemore Ave, thinking of all the music history that passed through those doors. School let out next door at the shiny new Stax Academy, a music charter school. Quite a while later, a rickety City Wide cab pulled up. This time, the driver took local streets through the neighborhood south of downtown. As we passed Danny Thomas Boulevard, I thought out loud about how I didn’t associate him with Memphis. The driver was incredulous. “Danny Thomas? Father of Marlo?? Why sir, of course he’s associated with Memphis. He endowed St. Jude’s children’s hospital.” Sooo-rrry. It’s just that I don’t think of Danny Thomas and Memphis. More like Rufus Thomas. He still wasn’t having it.

(The next morning, on our drive out of town to see the porcelain monkeys, we got luckier with another City Wide driver. The car was in worse shape, but our driver (about my age) enjoyed talking the finer points of Stax and Memphis music. David grew up near McLemore in the 60s and 70s. He and his friends would see Isaac Hayes driving that gold-trimmed Eldorado around the neighborhood, and Hayes would invite the neighborhood kids into his studio. We got to talking about Johnnie Taylor and his 70s disco period. “But don’t forget,” David said, “that he was a fine singer. After all, remember who took Sam Cooke’s place in the Soul Stirrers when he moved on.”)

The fare back to the Peabody-- 8 bucks. Over the next two days, Nancy and I kept chancing on Faye downtown, as she was picking up fares. “Hi, Chuck. How are you, baby?”

“Who was THAT?”

--Chuck Singleton