Lost in the Stax

Slow Train Take 1
Slow Train Take 2
Slow Train Take 3
William Bell / Steve Cropper
Ghosts of Stax Past
[Unreleased] : 196???

Welcome back!

You may have noticed, Möistworks took a big break in August. A weird combination of exhaustion and deadlines, I guess. MW 1.0 was a group effort—there were usually three or four of us posting at any given time. Now, it’s more like one person and a rotating cast of guest stars. Last time around there were no kids involved. [Correction: There was one. Megan Matthew’s daugher, Renee—all grown up now.] ] These days, there are three, asking for and deserving all kinds of attention. James and I relaunched the site at the height of NYC’s lockdown—the idea was to give folks good music to listen to, good things to read. Because of the aforementioned kids, there was more of an emphasis on children’s songs—the idea there was to give other parents a bit of a break by giving their kids good stuff to look at and listen to. All in all, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out Squarespace, which is fairly idiot-proof but also as limited and limiting as idiot-proof things (like bumpers on a bowling lane) tend to be.

Now it’s September, and New York’s a bit more normal than we expected it to be. School’s up in the air, things are as upside down as you’d expect them to be in a country run by malicious and stupid five-year-olds. Cautious optimism, insofar as we’re able to maintain it, as we brace ourselves for the inevitable, GoT winter-type situation. So, it seems like a good time to get MW 2.0 back up and running again, for the second time this year. Fall’s going to be super-busy for James and me both, but we’ll do our best to post a few times a week, starting with today’s post—which I’ve been looking forward to for a couple of weeks now.

Oh Girl
[Unknown]

Early Mar-Keys 1
Early Mar-Keys 2
Early Mar-Keys 3
The Mar-Keys
Ghosts of Stax Past
[Unreleased] : 196???

ROBERT

I met Robert Gordon in 2002, five or six years after my first visit to Memphis. That first trip I recall was a near-total wash; Beale Street had been torn down a few years earlier. There were still amazing clubs in the city, but I was too young and too stupid to know how to find them.

The trick would have been to go to Shangri-La records, down the street from Ardent Studios, and buy their $3 guide to the parts of the city the powers that be didn’t want tourists to see. Alternately, I could have read Robert’s excellent, idiosyncratic history, It Came From Memphis. which had just been published. I didn’t know any of that then, but by 2002 I did, and before I set out from New York I got ahold of Robert’s email. I’m guessing I told him I loved what he’d written; that ICFM was one of the books my friends and I passed around, hand-to-hand, and talked about in hushed tones. I’m pretty sure I offered to buy him a beer—which is really all I hoped for and had any right to expect. Robert wrote back right away and, in what I soon came to know as a typical example of Southern generosity, asked if I wanted to stay at his place instead. That’s something I would have happily done, but I was so impressed with him as a writer and all-around guide to all sorts of corners of Memphis, the last thing I wanted to do was put the guy out. I stayed at a Midtown hotel (the rock and roll Ramada, which is a long story onto itself), and met Robert (and his wife, Tara) in town. He turned out to be as generous in person as he’d been over email— we’ve been friends ever since—and I’d have much, much more to say about him, and Memphis, and It Came From Memphis, which is being republished next month in an updated twenty-fifth anniversary edition (if you haven’t read it yet, I envy you the experience). Instead, I’m going to get to the subject of this post…

Sugar
Got To Make You Mine
[Eddie Floyd?]

BTMG’s Warm-Up 1
BTMG’s Warm-Up 2
Booker T & the MGs

Jazz
[Sid Manker? Lynn Vernon?]
Ghosts of Stax Past[Unreleased] : 196???

STAX

When I first visited Memphis, the acre or two where Stax had stood had become an empty old lot. The studio had been knocked down, dismantled—Shangri-La sold bricks, like holy relics, for five bucks a pop. It’s been rebuilt since then, brick-by-brick, as a fantastic museum and music academy—Robert, who went on to write a book about Stax, and made a wonderful documentary about the label, worked on that museum, too—but this was all impossible to imagine on the night Robert jumped the fence around the demolition site and rescued as many of these lost reel-to-reel tapes as he could find.

It was 1989, Robert told me, over the phone from Memphis the other night. “I was at Sounds Unreel, at a [Jim] Dickinson session. The engineer told me he’d gone by Stax and slipped in—that there was a way in under the fence. I drove down. There was a stop work order on the building, so I went under the fence. I’d never been in the building. I couldn’t see a thing. I went back to my VW Bug, pulled up the back seat, and pulled out a book of matches—later on, I learned that the stop order was because of a gas leak. But there I was, lighting matches. I opened a door to a closet, looked down, and there were two boxes of tapes. Over the years, over a bunch of sessions—at Ardent, or at Chips Moman’s old new place, 3 Alarm Studio—I transferred it all: ‘Hey, the session’s slow, let’s see what we got!’ The thing I liked about this stuff was, I had outtakes of Otis Redding’s ‘Satisfaction,’ and it wasn’t as exciting as hearing William Bell working up ‘Slow Train’ or hearing these neighborhood kids auditioning.“

Piano and Female Demo
[Unknown]

Bundle of Joy
Wild One
Drunk Man 1

Make Everything Alright
Rufus Thomas

Bo Diddley
Drunk Man 2

White Silver Sands
[Unknown Organist]

Folk
[Two Females]

Terrible Thing
Love is Strange
[Audition for Allen Jones]

Fight On
[Gospel Woman]

Whatcha Gonna Do
William Bell w/Early Mar-Keys
Ghosts of Stax Past
[Unreleased] : 196???

“Fifteen years later,” Robert says, “I tracked that other engineer down and said, ‘Hey, let’s trade tapes!’ All of the stuff he’d gotten was safety tracks [duplicates of masters]. I think he’d gotten a top layer of stuff, and I’d found a closet where they’d thrown a bunch of stuff in the Sixties and never opened it again.

“I tried for years to get it out into the world. A lawyer said, ‘you need to know who every publisher, vocalist, and artist was.’ I threw it all up on my website, gave CDs to William Bell and Booker T. I might have given one to Cropper. I probably gave one to Duck Dunn. It was like a calling card.”

The copy I left Memphis with kept me company all the way across the country—the only time I drove coast-to-coast and back again, in a loop. Looking back now, I’d say those were some of the least lonely times I have known.

—Alex

WLOK: Night Train/Al Bell
Slow Piano Blues
WLOK: Green Onions
WLOK: News Intro
WLOK: Spot
WLOK: Weather
WLOK: Zipper Music
WLOK Bill Terrell
MG’s / House Band

Stanley’s Got a Sweetheart
Stan Daniels

BTMGs 1
BTMGs 2
Booker T. & the MGs

Dine O-Mite
Sir Mack Rice
Ghosts of Stax Past
[Unreleased / Robert Gordon] : 196???