Big Star: The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band

The atmosphere on the final Box Tops dates during the autumn of 1969 was worsening. Conflicts between new band members, unsatisfactory live performances and falling chart placings all added to the general malaise. ‘Our financial statements were two or three months behind,’ says Gary Talley. ‘Our manager and his attorney were getting their money right off the top, so the band was paying for everything from pencils to studio time. We’d had two gold records and were getting an advance of 150 dollars a week apiece and the band was exhausted from touring.’

‘In the winter of 1969 and 1970, I’d had more than I could stand and so finally, in a huff, I just blew it off,’ says Chilton. ‘So that’s how we disbanded.’ The final straw came during a planned two-week tour of England in December. The band arrived in London three days before the tour was to begin. After checking into their hotel on Bayswater Road they prepared to rehearse but ‘our rehearsal space turned out to be in the basement of an elementary school while school was still in session,’ recalls Talley. ‘As we walked in with our guitars, we were surrounded by boisterous six-year-olds with funny accents. We were led to the basement, where our gear for the tour was supposed to be set up for us.

‘Our equipment rider had specified what amps, drums and keyboards were to be provided. What waited was quite unexpected. We were greeted by our opening act, a West Indian reggae band called King Ollie and The Raisins. Their equipment was what we were going to have to use on the tour. Instead of Ludwig or Slingerland drums, there was a tiny drum kit identical to the one I received for my birthday when I was ten. Instead of the Fender amps, there were Marshall P.A. amps, not guitar amps. The not-Hammond B3 organ was a tiny Farfisa, but it did have a big wooden Leslie cabinet. We soon learned that the loud clunking sound we were hearing came from the broken rotating speaker in the Leslie, which banged against the cabinet every time it turned.’ The band’s management’s attempt to cut costs was at the expense of things that were vital for touring success in a foreign country.

Chilton and Talley discussed the situation and agreed that the band had reached the end of the road, literally. The tour was cancelled and some of the entourage went home and others stayed in England for a vacation, taking the opportunity to visit France. There was no storming offstage as has been reported elsewhere: it was all pretty low key.

Back in August 1969 the actress wife of Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, along with four others, was viciously murdered and mutilated in California. As 1969 drew to a close the police made an arrest and Alex Chilton found out about it during his impromptu vacation in London. ‘We were walking down the street with road manager Cleve Dupin,’ recalls Gary Talley. ‘We approached a newsstand and on the front page of the London Times was something that made Alex and Cleve turn white as two sheets. There on the cover was a guy who they had lived with for a few days at Dennis Wilson’s house in Malibu – Charles Manson!’ Manson had been arrested and was later convicted for the murders.

For a band that had started out so optimistically, and successfully, with ‘The Letter’, its gradual decline was all the more disappointing and frustrating. The final act was the spring 1970 release of a compilation Super Hits and the posthumous single ‘You Keep Tightening Up On Me’. Written by Wayne Carson Thompson and driven by the now familiar sitar-like guitar sound, it stuttered no further than number ninety-two in the US charts. By the end the Box Tops had had a total of seven US top forty hits (three had reached the top twenty in the UK) with the last being the peak of ‘Soul Deep’ at number twenty-two in August 1969. The touring version of the band had had a total of three different drummers, three guitarists, two keyboard players and a trio of bassists, but just the one lead singer.

There were rumours of a few shows put together by Roy Mack using a ‘fake’ band that didn’t include any of the previous members of the band but, apart from a short one-off appearance in 1989, it would be twenty-seven years before the original Box Tops played another show.

5 ‘We just figured we’d all be killed anyway’ (#ulink_8a6ed260-b65c-55af-8372-7465f15dfe1f)

Knoxville and Memphis, TN. 1967 to 1970

While most of the Box Tops’ recordings had been done at American Studios, an occasional bit of mixing or overdubbing was carried out across town at the high-tech Ardent Studios on National Avenue, owned by John Fry.

The first time Fry met Chilton was at one of these Box Tops sessions. ‘I met Alex when Dan Penn would come over to do some overdubs on Box Tops songs,’ he recalls. ‘I think “Cry Like a Baby” was the first thing we mixed for him. Sometimes Alex would come in with him to do some vocal overdubs. He wasn’t very talkative and my memory of him was his sitting on the floor in the corner waiting to do his part. Dan did the overdubs and mix at Ardent. He then went to Columbia Studios in Nashville to try another mix and brought that back to ask our opinion. It was awful; everything swimming in echo like it was emanating from the bottom of a well. We told Dan so and the Ardent mix was the one that would up being used.’

Terry Manning was an engineer at Ardent around this time and he also met Chilton during these sessions. ‘I had been working with Alex in the Box Tops and I played on “Cry Like a Baby”,’ explains Manning. ‘Dan Penn would come to Ardent and get me to engineer and mix for him. Mixing was starting to become this new thing rather than just what you ended up with when you finished recording. I also worked with Alex doing vocals for the Box Tops and I used to joke with him that I had played on more Box Tops records than any of the Box Tops!’

Ardent quickly became one of Memphis’s most sought-after studios and was always at the cutting edge of recording technology. This was a long way from the fabled ‘Granny’s sewing room’ where Fry had started recording as a teenager. Fry had been born in Memphis on New Year’s Eve 1944, his father worked in the building material business and his mother had worked as a bookkeeper. While still in junior high (at PDS) Fry had assembled his first studio at his parents’ home on Grandview Avenue. ‘There was a room on the house that had originally been the garage,’ explains Fry. ‘That was enclosed and another garage was built. The control room was in the old garage. Then there was another room attached to the new garage, about seventy-five feet away, that had originally been built for my maternal grandmother who lived with us, but she never really had anything to do with it. So that became the studio and we ran the cables out there and had the control room in the original garage.’

It was quite an undertaking for a junior-high-school student, but he already had a partner. His friendship with John King dated back to very early school days. ‘I was interested in electronics and I was particularly interested in the radio,’ recalls Fry. ‘John King was my co-conspirator in this and we’d go to great lengths to listen to out-of-town stations and we had a pirate radio station and I was into building the equipment myself. This was late 1950s, early 1960s when it was much more common to build things yourself. We were into radio and into music but I can’t play a note and the only place I dare to sing is in church where there’s about five thousand others to hide it! I learned by trial and error and read stuff to learn how to build things.’

King was also born in Memphis in 1944 and met Fry and Fred Smith at PDS. ‘I grew up in the country,’ says King. ‘And thanks to my parent’s housekeeper I grew up listening to black music on WDIA here and WLAC in Nashville. I met John Fry and we both had a passion for radio and music and became best friends. John took naturally to electronics. We had two Gates turntables, an Altec console, and an Ampex reel-to-reel.’ In the late 1950s and early 1960s it wasn’t possible to just phone up a supplier and get a piece of studio equipment delivered. Fry would buy the parts and fabricate his own studio equipment with a soldering iron in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. This brand-new equipment was soon put to use with a string of local acts coming by.

Fry also decided to issue records on his own Ardent label, with two singles both by Freddie Cadell & The Twirls, ‘At The Rock House’ and ‘Joy Ride’. ‘By sixteen, we had a record charted on the Top Forty station, WHBQ,’ says King. ‘It was an instrumental, ‘The Hucklebuck’, by the Ole Miss Downbeats, a group that toured extensively around the mid-South and had quite a following. ’ The initial lifespan of the Ardent label ran from 1959 to 1965 and issued six singles. As well as Cadell’s and Ole Miss Downbeats’ efforts (a second single, ‘Geraldine’, followed), they issued singles by the Shades, ‘Moonlight Sonata’, and finally two songs written by future Big Star producer Jim Dickinson for Lawson and Four More, ‘If You Want Me You Can Find Me’ / ‘Back For More’ in 1965.

In 1966 Fry’s parents sold the house on Grand View to Memphis State University and, at twenty-one, he had to decide what he was going to do with his recording studio. There were some new shop-front buildings being constructed at 1457 National Avenue and Fry chose to go for it and set up a commercial studio. ‘It was an empty space with no walls and we could go in and partition it off as we liked,’ explained Fry. ‘We leased that and split it into a control room, a small reception area, an office and a rather large studio, close to forty feet by forty, then there was a shop, a storage area, the restrooms and so on.’ At the time Fry was setting up the new premises, Fred Smith set off to college at Yale. ‘In one of his business classes he wrote the now-famous paper for an overnight freight-delivery scheme,’ laughs Fry. ‘His professor gave him a “C” and said there was no demand for such a service. Of course he went on to found Federal Express, but that didn’t really start until the early 1970s.’

When it came to fitting out the new Ardent Studio, Fry decided he would now have to buy some equipment in, and not just make it all himself. ‘We were really lucky,’ recalls Fry, ‘because as we were building and we were constructing the walls I ran into a guy who had started building consoles. He’d been an engineer at WDIA. He came by one day and had been engaged to build the first decent console that Stax ever had. I was really impressed and it changed our plans. We were going to buy this stuff from his company Auditronics to put our console in as well.’ Stax and Ardent studios ended up having similar equipment in their respective studios.

As Stax grew to the point that they were trying to put out more records than they had the capacity to record, overdub, mix and master, they started sending work across town to Ardent. Fry’s attention to detail and insistence on doing everything the ‘right’ way has led to him being likened more to a bank manager than a studio owner. (He dresses conservatively and sounds not unlike the late Jimmy Stewart.) Sometimes engineers and producers would come over from Stax, but sometimes they would leave it to the Ardent staff to carry out the necessary work. ‘We were still a bunch of kids,’ says Fry. ‘It still amazes me that they would let this bunch of kids fool around with their records. It was a great opportunity to go in a very short space of time from working in a garage studio to working on actual hit records that played on the radio.’

The other big customer for Ardent was a radio jingle company. While some engineers and producers would turn their noses up at recording radio jingles when they had the chance to work on some of the hottest singles in the country, Fry ‘enjoyed doing the jingle work and got a lot out of it. I credit that as being a free education because they would use all kinds of instrumentation that people wouldn’t customarily use on pop records. They would record music for all formats, for R&B, for Top Forty, for country and they would use orchestral arrangements.’ The arrangers who made these jingles were brilliant musicians in their own right who were bored to death by doing jingles. So they would experiment and try ever more outrageous things. ‘The result was that I got to record all of this stuff,’ says Fry, ‘and sometimes we’d have forty pieces playing at the same time and I’d have to try and record it on a four-track machine and leave one track open for overdubs. You can call it an education or a baptism of fire, you either learn it pretty fast or you just don’t get it. Nobody was doing anything like that.’

Today, Ardent is one of the most respected studios in the South. One of the things that helped make its reputation is the fact that Fry didn’t expect the people who worked at Ardent to be able to build all of the equipment as he could, but he did expect them to understand it. ‘Our equipment was very well maintained,’ he explained. ‘We followed the correct procedures for aligning tape machines, which most studios in this part of the country would not have done, so we were able to get a certain consistency. Even today too many engineers don’t have the fundamental understanding of how things work, they just press buttons. It’s very hard to be successful when you don’t understand what’s going on. To me, without the fundamental knowledge it’s just a kind of black magic as to how the signal gets on the tape.’

The word soon got around that Ardent was the place to go if you wanted a tape that sounded as though it had had a million dollars spent on it. The unassuming one-storey building, across the road from a supermarket, was a deceptive cover for the work that was busily going on behind its glass doors. As Ardent was becoming established, Fry rented out a small office building next door. Later this would be home to Ardent’s small promotional department. Fry also started taking on more staff, one of whom was Terry Manning from Lawson and Four More.

Manning was born in Oklahoma, which he describes as ‘a ranch north of Dallas’, and spent his earlier years in El Paso, Texas with his parents and two brothers. His father was a church minister and so the family would move between churches every couple of years.

It was while living in Brady, Texas, that Manning’s father had a morning inspirational radio show and Terry would attend the studio with his father as often as possible.

From an early age he had been enthralled by the microphones and equipment. ‘My parents would send me to bed and I thought that they thought that I was going to bed,’ he laughs. ‘But years later they told me they knew what I was doing. I would sneak a radio under my pillow and put my ear to the pillow and turn it down as low as possible so no one would know that I was listening to rock music – to Elvis or whatever was on at the time. I was fascinated by all of it and I was into the music and the fact that someone elsewhere could hear what you were thinking or feeling or playing.’

Manning’s mother tried to get him to take piano lessons but he preferred playing sports instead of the formality of practising his scales. ‘By the time I was eleven or twelve my mother decided to buy me a guitar to keep my interest in music going,’ he says. ‘I really liked it and I started learning chords and tried to play along with the radio. I found some other guys in the neighbourhood that had some instruments and we tried to put together some crude bands.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

A friend of Manning’s in El Paso was Bobby Fuller. Fuller had just recorded a song in his home studio called ‘I Fought The Law’ which was to go on to international success. ‘Nobody had a home studio like his. He had a real echo chamber and a quarterinch tape deck, some good microphones. So he recorded this local version of “I Fought The Law” and being the businessman he was, he had his own record label and I was quite envious of all of this, not in a bad way, I thought it was awesome what he was doing. At about the same time it hadn’t gone as far as he wanted and I wanted to go further. He’d been to Nashville but it hadn’t worked out and he said, “It’s got to be California.” The Beach Boys were just coming out and the California music scene was really big and he said, “That’s the place, I’m going to California.” I had just discovered Memphis music. I got some records by the Mar-Keys and Rufus Thomas, so I said to him, “What about Memphis?” and he said, “Nah, too close to Nashville. I’ve tried there.”’

Within days of this conversation, Manning’s father came home from work and announced that the family would be moving again. Of the three choices, one was Memphis, Tennessee. ‘It was too good to be true,’ recalls Manning. ‘The family had a vote and that was where we went. As soon as we got to Memphis I just went straight over to Stax records. I was quite young, had a guitar in my hand, knocked on the door and said, “I’m here.” They said, “What the heck do you think you’re doing?”’ And I said, “I’m going to engineer, I’m going to produce, I’m going to play. Anything you need!” And I did start working at Stax, but I was sweeping floors and putting tape copies together.

Once settled in Memphis and known at the local studios, Manning set about finding some new band-mates. He enrolled at Central High School and joined up with Bobby Lawson’s band, which was called Bobby and the Originals. Though Manning was more accomplished as a guitar player he played keyboards in the band. Like all the Memphis bands of the day, they wanted to get a slot on the Talent Party show so they recorded a demo, but they were rejected. Unbowed by the rejection they booked into the ‘granny’s sewing room’ version of Ardent to see if John Fry could work his magic with their tapes. At Ardent, Manning met Jim Dickinson for the first time. Dickinson gave the band a couple of songs he’d written to use on a single that Fry had agreed to issue on the Ardent label. The caveat was that they would have to change their band name.

‘We said, “We can’t change the name, everyone knows us, we’re famous,”’ recalls Manning. ‘We had won “battle of the bands” nineteen weeks in a row and had a local following, at least in one part of Memphis. However, we agreed and changed the name.’

The new name didn’t come easy and after weeks of discussion it was finally Manning’s father that gave the band their new moniker. ‘We’d been trying to think of a name but they all sounded stupid,’ admits Manning. ‘[My father] had heard some of the discussions and he said, almost facetiously, ‘Why don’t you be Lawson And Four More?’ I thought that was better than the other ideas so that’s what we became.’ The freshly revamped band, with the new single in their armoury, got a break when they were picked to play on the bill of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars. Dick Clark, of American Bandstand fame, was one of the biggest names in American music at the time and would bring together well-known stars and bus them around with a local opening act at each venue they visited. Manning recalls: ‘So we opened for the Yardbirds and Gary Lewis and the Playboys and the Animals and groups like that.’

The first church in Memphis that Manning’s father had been assigned to was earmarked to be demolished to allow a new freeway to be built. The Manning family was then moved to another congregation across town in East Memphis, where they got a new house on Sequoia Avenue, opposite the Rhea family. The Rheas had two daughters and a son, Steve, who was a big fan of the Who

(#litres_trial_promo) and especially Keith Moon. Rhea had his own drum kit and it didn’t take long for him and Manning to become friends.

In 1967 Rhea, then in eleventh grade, transferred from White Station High to MUS. As well as jamming at home with Manning, Rhea was drummer in a band called the Strangers, where he’d wear his pride and joy, a ‘bulls-eye’ sweatshirt similar to the one Keith Moon had worn when the Who played on Shindig. All the other members of The Strangers attended MUS already and so he fitted right in. The Strangers were sometimes allowed to play shows at MUS and on one occasion they set up in the school’s foyer.

‘It was a huge lounge area,’ says Rhea. ‘When you cleared out the chairs it gave enough room for kids to dance. It wasn’t built for acoustics and was a real “live” room. They set us up on a stage about a foot and a half high. That was the only time I remember anyone playing in the foyer. All subsequent dances were in the dining hall which had better acoustics.’ As the show progressed, Rhea noticed a young kid hanging around the front of the stage, watching the musicians closely as they ran through their set of cover versions. At the end of the show the kid was still hanging around and Rhea approached him. It was the first time he met Chris Bell. Also being a fan of the Who, Bell must have noticed Rhea’s sweatshirt and the two then bonded further over their mutual love of the Beatles and Yardbirds.

In the autumn of 1968 the Strangers broke up and Rhea was asked if he wanted to join Bell in a band with a mutual friend, Vance Alexander. Alexander had come up with the name Christmas Future for the band and so he got the job of singer, Bell played guitar (a red Gibson Hollowbody) and Rhea would be the drummer. Rhea recruited Peter Schutt, from the Strangers, as bass player. ‘Vance was a Doors freak,’ recalls Rhea. ‘Jim Morrison was his main interest, but Chris and I didn’t share his passion for Californian music. We liked the Byrds and Chris said he was amazed that Buffalo Springfield had opened for the Box Tops but that was as far as it went.’ Things didn’t go smoothly and Rhea and Alexander didn’t get along. Sometimes fights would break out during practice. ‘I suppose I was pretty arrogant about my tastes in music,’ admits Rhea, ‘and he finally had enough. He didn’t stay in the band very long after that.’

The way things were shaping up, it was only a matter of time before Rhea introduced Bell to Manning and with Alexander leaving the group Manning soon joined the Christmas Future roster. Rhea drove Manning out to the Bell estate and they started rehearsing in the back house. As Manning, Bell and Carole Ruleman were into photography, they also set up a dark room in the building; David Bell also shared the group’s love of art. ‘I won’t say it was a bohemian hippy community,’ says Manning. ‘It was a bunch of guys into several art forms all at once. It was a one-storey house; a living room where we had band practice, a bathroom, a small dining area that was used as the dark room. It had several rooms, electricity to power the amps; we could play as loud as we wanted, no one could hear us. It was the countryside then but now it’s all built up around there.’ It was, in other words, the perfect hangout for a group of anglophile semi-hippies.

‘They were doing things like Hendrix and the Who,’ recalls David Bell. ‘The back house is where I probably did the most damage to my ears, sitting in front of amps blaring at impossible volume. He [Chris] just kept getting better and better and at this time began to get into the old Ardent and learn recording.’ Christmas Future spent many hours practising in the backhouse but also at MUS, where they were allowed to use the stage in the school’s chapel to set up their equipment. Schutt left not long after Alexander, and was replaced on bass by Bill Boyce.

While MUS, had college preparation as their goal for every student, Bell didn’t really fit in. ‘He wasn’t very happy at MUS because he was different,’ says his sister Sara. ‘Chris would go to MUS in the proper attire – there wasn’t a uniform but there was accepted attire – but when he got there he would change into his bell-bottoms and then they would call from the school and say, “He’s done it again”. Chris had shown an interest (and he wasn’t very sporting) in playing basketball at MUS, but he would have to cut his hair to do it and he wouldn’t do it.’

‘Chris and I were two of the relatively few bad boys at MUS,’ says Andy Hummel. ‘We both smoked so we got to know each other sneaking off to smoke between classes. I was moved to MUS because I think my parents were afraid I was going to get someone pregnant. Also, I had become a bit of a bad ass and quite uncontrollable. They really wanted to send me to the Christian Brothers school, which was known for its tight discipline. But I couldn’t get in so they settled for MUS.’

There were frequent dances after football games but until about 1967 most bands played soul music and the latest chart hits. By the time Christmas Future were playing gigs at the school, they wanted to give their audience a musical education. In a 1975 interview, Chris Bell explained that: ‘It was mostly soul music in high school so we decided to start a kind of underground movement in order to get a group together; a group that would just play English music. [The audience] hated most of it really. They would come and ask for “I Feel Good” by James Brown and we would play “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles.’

‘So we played this startlingly new music that many of them had never even heard before,’ adds Rhea. ‘We didn’t care if the audience liked us, which was probably our downfall. We were playing Who numbers at MUS. John Fry had worked up a cartridge tape player with sound effects and then we would play a Yardbirds song and when we got to the perfect moment Terry raced over to the cabinet and slammed his foot on a pedal to trigger this explosion sound on the cartridge. We were in heaven playing this stuff. At the end I smashed my cymbals and drums into the wall and for years there was this chunk missing from this wall panelling. We never went back after that.’

Next to MUS was the Hutchison School for girls. Chris Bell, Andy Hummel, Steve Rhea, Vance Alexander and his friend Earl Smith (a cousin of Fred Smith) were allowed to take art classes at Hutchison and girls from there could take drama classes at MUS. Three of these girls were Carole Ruleman, Vera Ellis (Alex Chilton’s future girlfriend) and Linda Schaeffer.

‘Andy and I met in 1968 when he took an art course at Hutchison,’ recalls Schaeffer. ‘He was dating someone else, as was I, but we always dated each other when the other had a falling out.’ Vera Ellis also met Bell and Hummel at the art classes. ‘They were low key, not macho, not especially athletic,’ she says. ‘Chris was quiet, shy, very intelligent, with a sharp sense of humour. Andy was friendly, fun to be with, eager for new experiences.’ Carole Ruleman was the feature editor and photographer for Hutchison’s school newspaper, The Lantern’. ‘I was still dating Earl Smith,’ says Ruleman. ‘We were almost too young to call it dating. Earl lived way out east in Collierville and his mother had a yardman who would double as a chauffeur. Earl and Chris came to my house on Avalon in Midtown. Chris was standing next to, but a little behind, Earl, which was the nature of their relationship, indeed, many of Chris’s relationships. Chris was as he often was – sweet, shy and polite.’

‘The bottom line was we were confused, insecure children with no direction,’ adds Schaeffer. ‘We were hippies at a prestigious school that prided themselves on where they bought their clothes and what brand of shoe they were wearing. We didn’t fit there.’ Earl Smith’s chauffeur would take the trio of Smith, Ruleman and Bell cruising in the car and buy them beer and cigarettes. Then they’d spend hours on Ruleman’s side porch listening to records by the Beatles, the Who, Yardbirds, and Cream. ‘Earl was more into the Doors and American music,’ recalls Ruleman. ‘Chris and I always managed to work the turntable back to the English music. There was a classic book of photographs, Family of Man, on the side porch that we regularly studied. We used to go out to Chris’s back house and I remember that a friend had a bad LSD trip one day. He was running after Chris and me across the long stretch between the back house and the Bells’ house, saying that he was being chased by a mad dog that was going to hurt him. He grabbed me around the waist and hips and pleaded with me and Chris to help him. It really frightened me. I never took LSD, and Chris wasn’t taking any heavy drugs that I knew of for a long time. Whereas our friend went off more deeply into heavy drugs.’

A clique developed that included Hummel, Bell, Ellis, Ruleman and Schaeffer. ‘We were cynical of everyone else,’ says Schaeffer. ‘We stayed apart from the others, thinking ‘We’re cool and they aren’t.’ The best families in Memphis sent their kids to those two schools and propriety and snobbishness were not high on our list.’

‘Chris and I started going out,’ says Ruleman. ‘My mother would give us a little money to go to the movies. There was an art house called the Guild several blocks from my house, and we spent a lot of sweltering summer afternoons there. We loved Morgan with David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, and another favourite was Georgie Girl with Alan Bates, Lynn Redgrave and Charlotte Rampling. We must have seen it five or six times. First, we had to sit through these embarrassing trailers for this voyeuristic erotica called I, a Woman. The actress was nude and studying her body in a mirror to this grandiose voice-over that repeatedly boomed “I, a Woman”, “I, a Woman”, “I, a Woman”. We were such kids. We were both embarrassed. Every time we saw the promo, we’d crack up, and find ourselves sinking lower and lower into the seats. Then sliding deeper into the theatre chairs was the joke, and we’d laugh and laugh until the trailer was finally over. Then Georgie Girl came on, and we were transported to England.’

While the meeting of Bell and Terry Manning had introduced Manning to new bands to play in, the favour was returned by Manning introducing Bell to John Fry and Ardent Studios. ‘Chris and I started hanging out at the studio,’ says Rhea. ‘Eventually, John trusted us to come in at night when no one was booking the studio and record our own music.’

Business at Stax was booming. ‘We brought a lot of Stax business over to Ardent,’ says Manning. ‘It was sometimes overflow business and sometimes they wanted to try different things. We were known as the hi-tech place because John and I would go out and find the latest, newest thing. We were the first to get a four-track, eight-track, sixteen-track and so on. Not just in Memphis but also in the whole South or the whole US. So they would look to us for, without meaning to put down what they did, they saw us as another level of audio quality and a way to do different things.’