Looking for a Brighter Day

Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day

— Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," 1970

At 11:08 p.m. on August 11, 1965, a California Highway Patrol officer named Lee Minikus pulled over a 21-year-old Black man named Marquette Frye on Avalon Boulevard in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles. By the time it was over, six days later, 34 people were dead, more than a thousand were injured, and 600 buildings had been damaged or destroyed. The National Guard deployed 14,000 soldiers. The damage was estimated at $40 million.

Seven years later, on August 20, 1972, 100,000 people gathered at the LA Memorial Coliseum. Admission was one dollar. The Stax record label organised it as a fundraiser for the Watts Summer Festival, the community event that had grown from the ruins of the uprising. Richard Pryor told stories between the acts. Rufus Thomas, 54 years old, wore pink hot pants and did the Funky Chicken in front of a crowd the size of a small city. Isaac Hayes arrived by motorcycle, draped in chains, Black Moses incarnate. The Staple Singers asked: will you take me there?

The seven years between 1965 and 1972 are this series. In that time, the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) passed. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. The Poor People's Campaign marched on Washington and dispersed without its demands met. The Black Panthers were systematically dismantled by COINTELPRO. Nixon won the 1972 election in a landslide. Sixty thousand Americans died in Vietnam, a disproportionate number of them Black.

The movement had won its legal battles and watched those victories prove insufficient. The brighter day was not on the horizon. And yet on August 20, 1972, 100,000 people gathered in a stadium in the city that had burned seven years earlier. They did not come to mourn. They came to assert something — about dignity, about collective identity, about the specific quality of Black joy as an act of political defiance — that cannot be expressed in a legal brief or a march route. They came to be in the street together, looking.

This series is organised around that day and what surrounded it: the Stax Records story that made the concert possible; the specific artists who performed; Gil Scott-Heron, who was not there but whose diagnosis of the moment was the most precise; the wider early 70s Black music world of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and Al Green; and the collapse of Stax in 1975, which is both the end of an era and a reminder that the brighter day does not arrive on schedule. The looking continues regardless.

The specifics matter. Stax Records organised the event as a benefit concert for the Watts Summer Festival and community charities. Tickets cost one dollar. The acts performed without fee. The proceeds went directly back into the community that had burned seven years earlier. This is not the same thing as a charity concert by White musicians for a Black community — this is a Black-owned record label giving its biggest artists' time and talent back to the community those artists came from.

Al Bell, who ran Stax, understood what he was building. The concert was filmed by Mel Stuart — the same director who had just made Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory — and released the following year as both a documentary film and a double (later expanded) live album. It became the record of what that afternoon actually was: the temperature, the density, the specific quality of 100,000 people in the same space choosing to be there.

Richard Pryor's stand-up segments between the acts are as important as the music. Performing for a Black audience without the mediating presence of White television censorship, Pryor talked about being Black in America in 1972 with a precision and fury and comedy that he could not deploy anywhere else. The segments were cut from the original theatrical release and only restored decades later — which is itself an argument about who the mainstream film industry thought the audience was.

The Emotions opened. Frederick Knight played. Carla Thomas. Little Milton. The Bar-Kays. Rufus Thomas closed the first half by doing the Funky Chicken. The Staple Singers performed "I'll Take You There," which had reached number one on the pop charts that same year. Isaac Hayes arrived last, preceded by his own mythology: chains, motorcycle, the full Black Moses presentation. The crowd received him as exactly what he had styled himself to be.

The concert's significance is not that it was the Black Woodstock. That comparison diminishes it. Woodstock was a predominantly White festival of countercultural escape. Wattstax was a community gathering of political assertion. The difference is not one of scale or genre but of purpose and relationship: Woodstock happened in a field in upstate New York for people who had temporarily left their lives; Wattstax happened in the city where the people lived, organised by their own cultural institution, featuring their own artists, for their own community. The revolution was not televised. It was live.

In 1957, Jim Stewart founded a record label in a Memphis garage. He was a White country music fiddle player who had noticed that nobody was recording the rhythm and blues coming out of the Black clubs on Beale Street. His sister Estelle Axton mortgaged her house to buy recording equipment. They called the label Satellite, then changed it to Stax — an abbreviation of their surnames. They moved into the Capitol Cinema at 926 East McLemore Avenue, a defunct movie theatre in a Black neighbourhood, and started recording.

The house band that emerged was Booker T. & the MGs: Booker T. Jones on Hammond organ and Steve Cropper on guitar (both still teenagers), Donald "Duck" Dunn on bass, and Al Jackson Jr. on drums. Jones and Jackson were Black; Cropper and Dunn were White. They played together in a city that was legally segregated. They ate together in the studio, drove together to gigs, made music together every day in a neighbourhood where their presence as a mixed group was noticed and, by some, resented. They did it anyway.

The Stax sound is inseparable from the room it was made in. The Capitol Cinema had sloping floors from its days as a movie theatre, which created a specific acoustic — a warmth and looseness that engineers at other studios spent years trying to replicate. The musicians recorded live together, rarely using headphones, playing off each other in real time. There was minimal overdubbing. What you hear on a Stax record is what happened in that room, on that day, between those people.

The label's roster expanded rapidly: Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Wilson Pickett, Albert King. The Memphis Horns — Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love — played on everything, the sound that defined the label's identity as much as any individual artist. By 1967, Stax was one of the most important labels in American music and the most commercially successful Black-owned entertainment company in the country.

Then Otis Redding died in a plane crash in December 1967, three days after recording "Sittin' On The Dock of the Bay." He was 26. And the relationship with Atlantic Records — which had handled Stax's national distribution — collapsed. Atlantic had retained ownership of the Stax masters. The entire pre-1968 catalogue was gone. Stax started over. What it built in the years between 1968 and 1972 is the subject of the next three lectures.

In 1967, Isaac Hayes was a staff songwriter and session musician at Stax. He had co-written "Soul Man" with David Porter, producing one of the label's biggest hits for Sam & Dave. He was 25 years old, grew up in poverty in Covington, Tennessee, raised by grandparents after his mother died and his father abandoned the family. By 1969, he had transformed himself into something American popular music had never quite seen before.

Hot Buttered Soul (1969) was the album that did it. Four tracks. Total running time 45 minutes. The opening track, "Walk On By" — a two-minute pop song Burt Bacharach had written for Dionne Warwick — runs for twelve minutes. "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," Jimmy Webb's country pop standard, runs for eighteen. Hayes didn't cover these songs; he colonised them, remaking them as extended orchestral meditations that had almost nothing in common with their origins. The talking sections alone — Isaac speaking in his low baritone about love and loss before the song proper began — were unlike anything in popular music.

The Shaft soundtrack (1971) brought him to a mass audience and an Academy Award. "Theme from Shaft" is one of the most recognisable pieces of music of the 20th century: the wah-wah guitar figure, the strings, Hayes's voice promising that Shaft was a bad mutha— before the chorus cuts him off. It was the first film score by a Black composer to win the Oscar for Best Original Song.

Black Moses (1971) is where the persona reached its fullest expression. The double album came in a package that unfolded into a cross — Hayes with arms outstretched, chains across his chest, head bowed. The chains were both the slavery reference and its inversion: he wore them freely, as ornament and declaration. Black Moses was not a humble prophet. He was a figure of Black masculine power and spiritual authority who had arrived at exactly the moment the community needed him.

At Wattstax, Hayes performed last. He arrived by motorcycle surrounded by bodyguards and was received with the kind of intensity normally reserved for heads of state or religious figures. Both categories applied. He was 29 years old and had become something that the culture had built specifically to receive.

Roebuck "Pops" Staples was born in Winona, Mississippi in 1914. He played guitar in the juke joints of the Delta before the war, learned from the same tradition that produced Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. After the war he moved to Chicago, joined the Pentecostal church, and started a family gospel group with his children: Cleotha, Pervis, Yvonne, and Mavis. He put the Delta blues tremolo — the sound of the juke joint, of desire and danger — inside the Black church, and made something that didn't exist before.

The Staple Singers had been recording since the early 1950s, moving through Vee-Jay, Epic, and Riverside before signing to Stax in 1968. The Al Bell years transformed them from a respected gospel act into a crossover phenomenon — but the transformation was possible only because the music's integrity remained absolute. Al Bell understood that you didn't change the Staple Singers; you found the context in which what they already were could reach the widest possible audience.

"I'll Take You There" (1972) is the proof. It reached number one on both the R&B and pop charts. The track is built on a bass ostinato borrowed almost directly from a Jamaican rhythm — Al Bell had heard the influence of Jamaican music in Stax and incorporated it consciously. Over that groove, Mavis Staples improvises. The words are simple, almost liturgical. The invitation — I'll take you there — is political, spiritual, and musical simultaneously. The there is wherever you need to get to. Mavis will take you.

Mavis Staples's voice is a specific instrument that deserves its own taxonomy. It contains gospel's collective urgency, blues's personal testimony, and soul's erotic charge, all at the same time. She sings from a specific place — the intersection of the sacred and the secular that the Black church tradition has always occupied — and refuses to pretend those are different locations. At Wattstax, performing "I'll Take You There" in the stadium where the Rams played, she was doing what the tradition had always done: turning the secular space into a church and the church into a political meeting.

Rufus Thomas was 54 years old. He had been working in music since before World War II, had worked as a vaudeville comedian, a radio DJ at WDIA Memphis (the first radio station in America programmed for a Black audience), and a recording artist for Sun Records and then Stax. He had hits with "Bear Cat" (1953), "Walking the Dog" (1963), "Do the Funky Chicken" (1969), "Do the Push and Pull" (1970). He was a veteran of the entertainment industry in the way that requires something harder than talent to achieve.

At Wattstax, he opened his set by noting that he was the only man in the stadium in a pink hot pants suit — a fact that required no elaboration. He then performed the Funky Chicken with complete physical commitment in front of 100,000 people. He was not trying to look young. He was not embarrassed. He was doing the thing precisely because it was the thing to do, because joy performed with total conviction is more radical than fury performed at a distance.

The political content of Rufus Thomas's art is embedded in its form rather than its lyrics. He doesn't write songs about Black dignity; he performs Black dignity — as the right to be funny, to be sexual, to be ridiculous, to be 54 years old in a pink suit without explaining yourself to anyone. This is the tradition that runs from the blues and vaudeville through James Brown's splits and Prince's purple heels: the Black performer's insistence on occupying the full range of human expression, not the range assigned.

The word "funky" is itself the argument. Originally a pejorative term — funky meant something smelly, low, earthly — it was claimed by Black culture and transformed into a positive description of the quality that made music worth dancing to. The transformation of the insult into the compliment, the claim of the lowly as the powerful: that is the tradition Rufus Thomas carried, and the tradition he carried at Wattstax was one of the oldest and most resilient in American culture.

James Brown was the movement's general. Rufus Thomas was something else: the proof that the movement contained joy as well as fury, absurdity as well as dignity, and that these were not lesser weapons but different ones.

Gil Scott-Heron was not at Wattstax. He was in New York, playing smaller venues for smaller crowds, making records on Flying Dutchman that were heard by fewer people than saw Isaac Hayes arrive by motorcycle. His absence from the concert is part of the argument: he was always at a slight angle to the mainstream, even the Black mainstream, positioned as observer and diagnostician rather than celebrant.

"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" was recorded in 1970, first as a spoken word piece over bongo accompaniment, later rearranged with a full band for the Pieces of a Man album (1971). It names its targets with a precision that journalism rarely achieves: Xerox, Schaefer beer, Natalie Wood, Spiro Agnew, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, the specific soap operas that occupied the specific television time slots where news might otherwise go. The specificity is the argument — not a general critique of consumer culture but an inventory of the exact mechanisms by which political consciousness is replaced with commercial distraction.

The poem's final turn — "black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day / the revolution will be no rerun, brothers / the revolution will be live" — is where it stops being satire and becomes statement. The revolution will be live means: it will happen in real time, in the streets, in the body, and it will not be mediated, packaged, rebroadcast, or available on demand. Wattstax, two years later, was not a revolution. But it was live.

Winter in America (1974) is the other essential Scott-Heron document of this series. Recorded after Nixon's re-election, after the war, after the movement's stall, it is the most precise diagnosis of the specific disillusionment this series is organised around. "The Constitution is a bill of rights / For someone else's sake." He was 25 when he wrote it. He saw the winter clearly while others were still looking for spring.

Scott-Heron died in 2011. His last album, I'm New Here (2010), made with XL Recordings' Richard Russell, was a late-career masterwork — old man's voice, young producer's beat, the same unflinching attention to what is actually happening. He never stopped looking for the brighter day. He never pretended it had arrived.

Marvin Gaye recorded What's Going On in 1971 against Motown's resistance. Berry Gordy didn't want to release it — he thought it was uncommercial, too political, not what the audience wanted. Gaye insisted. The album reached number one. It is now, by most assessments, the greatest soul album ever made: a suite of interconnected songs about Vietnam, ecology, poverty, and the condition of being Black in America, orchestrated with the sophistication of a classical composer and sung with the intimacy of a confession.

The question the album asks — what's going on — was the same question being asked in Watts, in Detroit, in Memphis. It is not a rhetorical question. Gaye genuinely wanted to know: how do we account for where we are? How do we mourn what has been lost? How do we go on? The album's final track, "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)," answers: we holler. We make art that is equal to the grief. We refuse to make it smaller than it is.

Curtis Mayfield's Superfly (1972) is the other essential document — and the more morally complex one. Mayfield wrote a soundtrack that critiques the film it accompanies: the blaxploitation genre celebrated the hustler's glamour, and Mayfield's music acknowledged that glamour while making its costs audible. "Freddie's Dead," "Pusherman" — the beauty of the music is part of the trap, which is a more sophisticated argument than simply refusing to make the soundtrack beautiful.

Al Green at Hi Records in Memphis, under producer Willie Mitchell, was making the opposite argument in the same period: not the political suite or the blaxploitation critique but the intimate personal statement, the love song pushed to the edge of gospel. Let's Stay Together, I'm Still in Love with You, Call Me — records of extraordinary restraint, Mitchell's production stripping away everything that wasn't essential, Green's voice finding an emotional precision that soul music had not previously achieved. The personal and the political are not separate — the right to love, to tenderness, to private life is exactly what the movement was fighting for.

The specific mechanism of Stax's destruction is worth understanding precisely because it wasn't an accident. In 1972, Al Bell negotiated a distribution deal with CBS Records that gave Stax a $6 million advance against future royalties — the largest deal in Black entertainment history at that point. CBS pressed and distributed approximately 30 million Stax records over the following three years. When it came time to pay royalties on those sales, CBS claimed the records hadn't sold. The Stax accountants said they had.

The legal battle consumed Stax's operating capital. By 1975 the label couldn't pay its artists, couldn't fund new recordings, couldn't meet its basic obligations. In January 1976, a Memphis bank foreclosed. The doors of 926 East McLemore Avenue closed. The building was eventually demolished. The parking lot that replaced it is still there.

Al Bell was indicted on federal conspiracy charges — a prosecution that many observers, then and now, understood as government interest in the destruction of the most economically powerful Black entertainment institution in the country. Bell was acquitted. The acquittal came too late to save the label.

What survived was the music. The catalogue — which has changed hands multiple times, been reissued, been sampled, been studied — is one of the most valuable bodies of recorded music in existence. The artists survived. Isaac Hayes rebuilt his career. Mavis Staples is still performing. Booker T. Jones still records. The Stax Museum of American Soul Music opened in Memphis in 2003, on the site of the original studio. Admission is $13.

Gil Scott-Heron wrote "The Bottle" in 1974, the year Stax was dying, about a man drinking himself to death. He died of complications from HIV in 2011. He never found winter's end. The question "what's going on" remains unanswered in any form that has changed the underlying conditions. 100,000 people gathered in the Coliseum in August 1972 and asserted their dignity and their joy and their collective life. The brighter day was not the next day or the next year. The looking, which is what the music was always about, continues. The revolution will be live. It has not yet been broadcast.