Hear That Sound: The business of Memphis music

Golden era, great talents, philosophical differences, historical forces help shape local music industry's fate

By Bob Mehr

Sunday, June 14, 2009

If there was a truly golden moment in the colorful, remarkable history of Memphis music, it came in 1969.

That was the year that saw Stax Records rebound from the death of Otis Redding and a split with partner Atlantic

Records to relaunch in spectacular fashion with the release of nearly 60 albums and singles simultaneously.

Across town at American Sound Studios, producer Chips Moman and his house band were creating a seemingly endless streak of Top 40 hits for the likes of Neil Diamond and B.J. Thomas. That winter, even Elvis Presley shook off a decade of movie-making malaise to record his last great works at American.

It was also when Willie Mitchell came off the road and took over the reigns at Hi Records, siring a string of hits, many for young singer Al Green, who turned up at his door that fall, the two men helping write the last great chapter in Memphis soul music.

That was 1969. By 1979, it was all gone.

Moman and American left first. The highly strung producer, citing various personal slights and decreasing session work, closed his doors and left town.

Stax would fall next, the victim of a nasty bankruptcy that practically dragged the whole of the local music business down with it. By the time the remaining bits of the label's catalog were being auctioned off, Presley -- stuck in creative paralysis and self-parody for years -- was dead, Hi Records had been sold and moved to L.A. and Mitchell had left the label.

The music industry, which by 1973 was Memphis' third largest employer and its most identifiable asset, came undone.

"Looking at it now, you can see the music scene here in the late '60s and early '70s was held together with pine needles, rubber bands and a roach clip," says author and Memphis music historian Robert Gordon. "Although it fell apart, in a very dramatic way, the art that was created then has proven to be Memphis' greatest product after cotton."

Midway through 2009, the music industry -- nationally and internationally -- is in a state of unprecedented turmoil, beset by rapidly changing technologies, plummeting sales and flagging global economies.

Yet attempts to reinvent the Memphis music industry continue as they have for the last 30 years. This effort has been colored by an ongoing philosophical struggle between art and commerce, individual creativity and collective thinking. Underlying this conflict is the fact that Memphis' city fathers and business community only came to recognize Memphis music -- what it was and what it was worth -- once it was already gone.

'Crackpot' visionaries and changing trends

To understand the current state of the Memphis music business, it's important to understand its basic history, and to view what happened here in the context of what took place in the recording industry as a whole over the last half-century.

The genesis of the Memphis music industry came as a byproduct of World War II. Because of the rationing of materials needed to produce shellac for vinyl LPs, the major record companies of the time lost interest in what was then called "vernacular music" -- country and western, R&B, blues -- and instead focused on the broader and more profitable pop market. Out of this vacuum the great independent labels of the late 1940s and early 1950s -- including Memphis' Sun Records -- were born.

Crucially, a network of independent record distributors and manufacturing plants (including Memphis' Plastic Products, founded in 1949) also sprang up, helping create a self-contained and highly successful system.

Among the many Memphis labels that benefited from those developments, Stax Records eventually emerged as the leader.

The second era of Stax, which launched in 1969, would yield a massive run of hits and a growing cultural relevance that would culminate with the historic African-American summit of the Wattstax concert a few years later.

"Stax was driven to succeed, and to grow," says longtime label executive and insider Deanie Parker. "The phenomenon that Stax became during that period happened so quickly. We were running a sprint."

At its peak in the early '70s -- aided by some $10 million in loans from the local Union Planters National Bank -- Stax had grown into a major company, employing 200 to 300 people directly and many thousands more indirectly. But the label's decision to abandon independent distribution in favor of the CBS Records system in 1972, and a series of other internal problems, would be the start of the company's undoing.

"Stax's demise was extremely complicated and I don't think will be fully understood by anybody -- the participants or the historians," says Gordon, who directed "Respect Yourself," a PBS documentary about the label. "But Stax certainly wound up getting squeezed between the bank, CBS and its own ambition. It went from being a very strong company to having its guts torn out in a period of two or three years."

The bankruptcy of Stax in late 1975, and the way the company was simply left to die, was a costly lesson that revealed the gulf between Memphis music and the Memphis establishment.

"When Stax went under in the '70s, I don't think anybody in the general business community understood how the recorded music business worked, or why it was important to Memphis," says Ardent studio owner and onetime Stax label partner John Fry. "If you had a company of that size today and they were encountering difficulties, you would probably have all kinds of people stepping forward to help them find capital and work their way out of their difficulties rather than lose a valuable asset like that."

The reluctance of the Memphis establishment to recognize the value of a record label like Stax to the city was not entirely surprising.

"All the great musical moments in Memphis were done by people perceived to be crackpots," says Gordon. "No chamber of commerce or government organization was going to run around and say these crackpots have great ideas and they're a benefit for the community. Plus, we're also talking about companies dealing primarily in black music at a time where blacks were institutionally dismissed."

It took Presley's death in 1977 -- and the overwhelming worldwide response to his passing -- to fully and finally mark a shift toward seeing music as a viable asset to Memphis.

"Forget all the revisionist history: By the end of his life, the power people in Memphis perceived Elvis as a joke," says Memphis music scene stalwart Jim Dickinson. "But as soon as he died, he was OK. He was a tourist attraction. Before Elvis died, the words tourism and Memphis were never uttered in the same breath."

"Elvis' death, and seeing the world respond so massively to something that Memphis had dismissed, was a turning point," agrees Gordon. "People here thought, 'I may not like the music but I'd sure like to make a buck off of it.' Suddenly, people became aware that there was green in the blues."

Artists, businesses still in discord on dynamic

While the business of music tourism in Memphis would take several years, even decades, to find its feet, the tumbleweeds began to blow through the remnants of the city's label and recording business.

"The tide had turned against somebody being able to build up a large independent label in Memphis. To the point that not many people wanted to even try it," says Fry. "And as the large independent labels pulled out of the independent distribution system or sold themselves to major labels, the whole system started to contract. The '80s and '90s became the era of the major label once again."

Still, Memphis was able to boast numerous studio success stories, such as Ardent, where acts including ZZ Top and George Thorogood cut gold and platinum sellers, and Easley-McCain Recording, which helped birth many underground classics, including albums by Sonic Youth and The White Stripes.

"A lot of records were being made here; unfortunately, that doesn't have the same economic impact or critical mass that having a company, like Stax, which employs several hundred people on a year-round basis, does," says Fry.

Eventually, the city and business leaders realized that they had lost a tremendous economic asset with the demise of the Memphis music industry. Starting in the mid-'80s, the city began backing a series of mostly unsuccessful initiatives, like funding a studio complex for producer Chips Moman and the launching of several commissions and music business think tanks. Over the years, there were also failed attempts to attract outside development like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a proposed Justin Timberlake-led Stax Records relaunch.

"A lot of the early efforts were too narrowly focused, or sort of feeble, and lacked a certain direction," says Fry.

Fry -- who served on the various iterations of the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission beginning in the '80s, and is now a Memphis Music Foundation board member -- has watched in frustration as past government-directed efforts have floundered. Meanwhile, others, like Dickinson, believe there is a fundamental flaw in forcing commerce and creativity together in such a calculated way.

"Memphis is a town about individualism and attempts to organize it inevitably fail," Dickinson says. "Our successes, from Clarence Saunders to Napoleon Hill to Sam Phillips to Fred Smith, they've been individual things, not the product of a corporate or gang mentality. The music scene in Memphis is always better off when they leave it alone."

For Robert Gordon, there is, perhaps, a middle ground. "There is an old idea that music in Memphis is something that happens at night, in the dark corners of the city, and it's made by people the business community don't -- or shouldn't -- be around.

"That was true in the '60s and '70s. But things happen differently now, the times and industry have changed," says Gordon. "There's an argument to be made that there is a place for a working dynamic between the art world and the business world. Figuring out how to get those two groups to work together -- that's the real challenge."

Bob Mehr: 529-2517