MONKEY USA PART 4: STAX, MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

“Can you take me to Stax please?” Best sentence I’ve ever said to a cab driver. “Sorry sir, I’m not a taxi.” He was driving a something called a medical transportation vehicle. So, if you were in a Memphis hospital last month waiting for a new kidney, I apologise for the delay.

It did mean I got to say it again before we travelled the couple of miles from the tourist drinking dens of Beale Street to across the tracks to the noticeably non-tourist area of East McLemore Avenue. Funky part of town is the white boy euphemism for a poor black neighbourhood where it wouldn’t be advised to wander around alone. I hate saying things like this as it casts aspersions on the folk there, who – like anywhere – will consist of the friendly and not-so-friendly. The vast majority of Memphis people we met couldn’t have been nicer. However, had Mrs Monkey and I walked this particularly residential route we wouldn’t have looked more out of place had we been wearing Beefeater uniforms and whistling God Save The Queen. And quite frankly, if I were looking for an easy target, I’d pick on us. For a start, nobody in Memphis walks anywhere. It is eerie to walk streets so deserted. On the occasions you do see somebody they are immediately conspicuous. Later we’d walk a few blocks from Beale Street to the Lorraine Motel, the scene of Dr Martin Luther King’s assassination and now home to the National Civil Rights Museum (an extremely uncomfortable and moving experience) and the only person we saw was a toothless dude on a bike harassing us for money. I never fathomed how people got around as there were never many cars either. Maybe the locals have exclusive use of a series of underground tunnels. When the cabby dropped us off at Stax he said not to wander from the front of the building. He needn’t have wasted his breath, we weren’t going anywhere.

Back in 1959 Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton transformed a tired theatre on the corner of E. McLemore Avenue and College Street into the Satellite record shop, recording studio and label that would become Stax. The rest, you know. After Stax went bankrupt in 1975 the building went to ruin. Published in 1997 Rob Bowman’s Soulville USA, the definitive account of the label, ends on a sour note. The final page reading, “Tragically, in 1988 the Stax building was torn down. What should have been a national historic site remains in the late 1990s an empty field containing rubbish and junkie needles. It’s a disgrace, and speaks volumes regarding Memphis’s treatment of its African-American heritage.”

A disgrace indeed but Bowman can now have no complaints after a multi-million dollar investment as produced a tremendous turnaround. Stax – the name and the building - has been rebuilt on the same spot; the façade to the design of the original building, and houses the Museum of American Soul Music. Next door stands the Stax Music Academy, a non-profit organisation which uses “music education as a tool to enrich the lives of potentially at-risk children”. There's soul power, right there.

It’s difficult to fault the museum. Unlike other museum tours on our trip, this one was self-guided. It was huge; packed with over 2000 exhibits within a modern, well designed space. It starts with a short film about Stax beginnings, heyday and resurrection. Although not made too long ago it was noticeable how many artists have since passed away. The scale of the exhibition can be demonstrated by the first area which centres on an old wooden chapel that stood in the Mississippi Delta for over a hundred years. They didn’t just recreate Hoopers A.M.E. Chapel; they picked it up and dropped it here. With a gospel soundtrack playing and video archives around the outer walls, it firmly establishes the roots of soul in the church.

From there in, it’s a chronological story. It makes reference to non-Stax artists from James Brown and Aretha Franklin to the Motown stable and Memphis neighbours at Hi, but its focus is on its own acts, with the higher profile ones each afforded their own display of records, photos, instruments and personal items: Rufus Thomas’s funky boots, Mavis Staples’s dress, Otis Redding’s suede jacket, a suit belonging to Sam or Dave, but the most jaw dropping belongs to Isaac Hayes. Much is made of Stax being the perfect embodiment of racial harmony but after the death of Otis Redding, the assignation of King, and driven on by the new leadership of Al Bell, they became a potent symbol of Black Power. Nothing demonstrated power more than wealth and success and Hayes’s peacock blue 1972 Cadillac El Dorado pimp machine, trimmed with real gold and lined with white fur, with a television in the front and a bar in back, portrayed that in a most ostentatious manner. I’m not one for cars, but this was a sho’ nuff afro turner.

In keeping with the attention to detail spent on the exterior, Studio A has been rebuilt to the exact specifications of the original using previous blueprints, photos and surviving memories. I’d estimate the combined studios of Motown, Chess and Sun would fit within these four walls on this carpeted floor. Again true to the original it had been built on a slope (remember this started life as a theatre) with the raised control room where the stage had been. Set up ready to record another smash was the house band's equipment featuring Al Jackson’s drum kit, Steve Cropper’s guitar and amp, Duck Dunn’s bass combo, Wayne Jackson's trumpet, and the Hammond organ Booker T. used on – amongst other things - “Green Onions”.

There was also the “Hall of Records” which displayed hundreds of album sleeves (loads I’d never seen before) and walls filled with, possibly complete sets, of the blue “falling records” single releases and the yellow “fingersnap” ones. When all said and done, it’s the music that matters. It’s great to see where it was created, to see the stage outfits, to read the stories, to pay tribute, but you can’t put the sound, the feeling, the spirit, the emotion, the soul that comes out of those 7 inch pieces of vinyl into a museum. The subject matter alone makes the Stax Museum of American Soul Music the best museum I’ve been to; it’s as good as it gets, but nothing beats the music itself.

Next stop: Sun Records.

SHAFT with RICHARD ROUNDTREE IN CONVERSATION AT THE NFT

“Where you going Shaft?” asks honky cop to the private investigator out on the freezing New York sidewalk. “To get laid. Where you going?” And with an exaggerated laugh he saunters off leaving said cop looking useless and impotent.

It’s a great exchange and one of many in a film I’ve not seen for so long I’d forgotten how good it is. So it was doubly cool not only to see it at the NFT on Sunday, but for John Shaft, actor Richard Roundtree, to be there too.

Can you dig it?

Gone is the immaculate fro, gone is the bushy moustache, gone is the leather trench coat, and most definitely gone are the ball breaking black leather strides, but Richard Roundtree is still the man. Albeit a 68 year old man in a conservative blue blazer over a canary yellow v-neck sweater. But there’s enough in his chat with DJ and presenter Iyare Igiehorn to let you know he still ain’t a dude to be messed with. For well over an hour he’s happy to yak about the Shaft films but when the topics stray into more personal or touchy areas he stays resolutely tight lipped.

He starts by explaining how he came to play the role: he had done a little theatre acting he was mainly employed as a model but put in for the role anyway. During an interview with photographer/writer turned producer Gordon Parks, Parks puffed on his cigar and pointed to an advert in a magazine on his desk. “We want somebody who looks like that”. That somebody was Roundtree himself. Parks gave him his break and throughout the interview Roundtree heaps mountains of praise on a man that clearly had a huge influence on not just his work but his life as well. One audience member later rates Parks up there with Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson in the pantheons of great 20th Century black cultural figures.

Igiehorn, who refreshingly for this type of event, gallantly tries to stick to fan type questions – rather than technical filmmaking questions – asks how he dealt with suddenly being an unexpected star after the huge success of Shaft in 1971. Roundtree thinks carefully. “I didn’t have to use toilet paper. You know what I’m saying?”. I’m thinking he was such a big cheese he had bitches wipe his hairless butt (more of that later) but he was trying to politely say he believed the hype and thought his shit didn’t stink.

Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?

Without using the words Igiehorn tries to ask about the superstar lifestyle: the parties, the women, the drugs. Roundtree is having none of it. “The 70s were great” he says. That’s it. “Come on man, you can’t leave it at that?” But he does. “Lean on him” shouts someone. “You want me to lean on Shaft?” Still no dice. Attempts to extract juicy gossip about likes of Pam Grier are met with an impenetrable silence and a steely look.

They say this cat Shaft is bad mother –

We do though get a glimmer into one party though, held by Miles Davis. “Good job”, says Miles, “but you gotta learn to say motherfucker”.

Shut your mouth.

A fight scene from Shaft’s Big Score (1972) is shown, as is a bonkers scene from Shaft In Africa (1973) where a naked Shaft waking up next to a horse and then – still naked – engages in a spot of stick fighting before burying himself in sand. “What did you think when you read that in the script?” he’s asked. Roundtree doesn’t really answer but does say that Shaft In Africa is his favourite Shaft film as it was only then he felt comfortable with the role. And by the look of it comfortable prancing around waving his big stick in the air; although he had no idea his daughter’s classmates would discover the film years later.

The thorny issue of the blaxploitation genre – its portrayal of pimps, junkies and whores received negative vibes from within the black community - is touched upon and Roundtree how he’s met people in Mississippi and beyond who’ve told him how empowering the films have been to them and how he gets angry when people talk about exploitation. Watching Shaft again and seeing such a strong, cool, no nonsense, intelligent black man in a leading role you can see his point. And as Igiehorn remarks “it’s a movie where the black guy lives to the end!”

An audience question about the short lived TV series of Shaft is met with an obvious understatement of “I was not overly enamoured with it” and the Samuel L. Jackson remake received equally short thrift “needless to say I was underwhelmed”. Although he didn’t quite say it, it was apparent he was upset Jackson got the gig instead of him, which contrasted with Isaac Hayes’s reaction when he thought he’d get the original Shaft role but was still the “consummate gentleman” and such a “mellow human being”.

After a career that includes eight pages of an acting CV, Roundtree is forever going to be known as Shaft and expresses some regret almost all his subsequent roles have been as authority figures (not hard to see why), and leaves with the line “sometimes you just got to ride the horse in the direction it’s going”.

Damn right.