Free Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) by Christopher R. Weingarten Page B

even let the superstars gaze at his console. Creative freedom was imperative because, as they would be the first to tell you, Public Enemy were out to make history, not please an A&R rep. According to Hank, Simmons didn’t even
like
Public Enemy records until they started selling.
    With Rubin’s blessing, Public Enemy were ableto work outside the time-tested model of the record label. Their defiance would cement hip-hop as an album genre, just like what Marvin Gaye helped do for soul when he threatened the Motown pop factory with defection if they didn’t support
What’s Going On
, or Stevie Wonder when he used the independently produced
Music of My Mind
as a bargaining chip in his contract. But in 1969, one album in particular cleared a slow, smooth, string-soaked path to autonomy.
    * * *
    When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, the black-consciousness movement lost its voice and — about two miles away from where it happened — so did Isaac Hayes. “I went blank,” said Hayes. “I couldn’t write for about a year — I was filled with so much bitterness and anguish, till I couldn’t deal with it.” 62 Just the day before, Hayes had marched with King in support of Memphis’ striking sanitation workers. For their troubles, they were hit with mace and attack dogs. Sometime after 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, King was shot by a rifleman’s bullet on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Hayes was only a stone’s throw away, in a taxicab headed to the Stax recording studio. When he got the news, Hayes and songwriting partner David Porter drove over to the Lorraine and saw the pandemonium first-hand. On some streets there waslooting; others had an eerie stillness. Hayes took to the radio that night to plead for peace.
    More than 125 cities reported racial violence, and many of them took advantage of the 24,000 National Guards that President Lyndon B. Johnson had dispatched. The National Guard in Memphis enforced a curfew, which Stax — in consideration of the studio’s importance to the community — was given permission to ignore. The Stax team set out to record throughout the night. Staffers moved some of the master tapes out of the studio as a precautionary measure, in case they were victims of rioting. The grocery store across the street was burned to the ground, but rioters would not touch the Stax studio, a revered community institution.
    The National Guard set up camp on the corner outside the studio. A guardsman almost shot Hayes’ friend Benny Mabone when he poked his head outside the studio door. The morning after, MGs bassist Duck Dunn was sitting in his car when Hayes walked over to have a chat — a conversation that was immediately broken up by a swarm of police cars, with officers pointing shotguns at Hayes. As white-owned businesses around the studio burned to the ground, new tensions would be created in the Stax family, a crew that was made up of white and black musicians who had collaborated for years to make hit records.
    Since first playing piano and co-writing Floyd Newman’s “Frog Stomp” in 1964, Hayes had been an integral player in what the bottom of the Stax letterheadasserted was “The Memphis Sound — The soul label for your swinging turntable.” With records cut live in the back of a converted movie theater, Stax was the sound of
soul
— as in human soul. It allowed house drummer Al Jackson, Jr.’s snare cracks to lag behind the beat; it released takes in which the energy and feel were more important than things like tempo and pitch; its studio never really had the best equipment — all in sharp contrast to the comparatively clinical music coming out of Detroit, the Public Enemy to Motown’s Marley Marl. Stax owner Jim Stewart, a white bank teller and country fiddler who had formed the label out of his Satellite Records upstart in 1958, always asserted that it made “black music,” unlike Motown, which made hits geared for maximum crossover appeal.
    In 1964,