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High Profile: Alvertis Bell

By Jack Hill

Alvertis Isbell

A half-century in the recording business has given Al Bell a towering stature. Now he’s working on ‘a new paradigm’ for the music industry.

By Jack W. Hill Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

For every successful singer or musician, someone else can be found off to the side or behind the curtain.
 Al Bell — who steered Stax Records into a world of hit records akin to that of Motown Records in Detroit — has been such a person. Born in Brinkley as Alvertis Isbell, he has been a disc jockey, record producer and songwriter as well as an executive at the label that made Memphis a major name in pop-music circles in the 1960s.
From 1965 to 1975, Bell was involved in nurturing the careers of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Booker T and the MGs, Johnnie Taylor, Sam and Dave, The Bar-Kays, The Emotions, The Dramatics, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Billy Eckstein, Rufus Thomas and his daughter, Carla Thomas.
Bell even wrote some of the hits he worked on, among them “I’ll Take You There,” a No. 1 hit in 1972 for The Staple Singers; “Comfort Me” for Carla Thomas; “Hard to Handle” for Otis Redding; and songs for Isaac Hayes, Eddie Floyd and others.
Honors for Bell’s accomplishments have been numerous, with the latest coming in September, when he received the Ahmet Ertegun Leadership Award from The R&B Foundation. The award was especially gratifying to Bell, who considered Ertegun — co-founder in 1946 of landmark soul, jazz, rhythm and blues, and eventually rock, label Atlantic Records — a mentor.
“He was a great music man,” Bell recalls. “From him I learned more about this wonderful business of ours than most people are able to absorb in an entire lifetime.”
Now 68 and living in North Little Rock, where he grew up, Bell is marking half a century working with recorded music. It’s a fascination that began when he was president of the Audio Visual Aid Society at Scipio A. Jones High School in North Little Rock.
As one of the students in charge of movie projectors and record players, Bell began getting requests from students to stage record hops on weekends. Before long, he found himself knocking on the doors — sometimes literally — of the music industry.
“I think I had a gift for gab, and it was noticed by one of the jocks at Little Rock’s first black-oriented radio station, KOKY, back when AM was our only radio format,” Bell says. “I had asked one to be a judge at a school talent show, and afterwards, the station manager asked me to come by one day after school. It turned out that they wanted to make a DJ out of me.
“My start came with doing a gospel music show on Sunday morning and then after I graduated and went on to Philander Smith College, I got the regular morning gig during the week.”
He also took the more radio-friendly name of Al Bell. He thought about the ministry for a time and attended Oakwood College Theological Seminary. In 1959, he went to Georgia and worked for a year with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, taking part in numerous marches.
As Bell absorbed knowledge about the way hit songs were made, he moved to Memphis and a job at WLOK radio in 1961. Before long, he was working in Washington, where he played music by Stax artists and other Southern blues and rhythm and blues artists who were outside the mainstream of the major labels.
“During my days at KOKY, I met folks like Aretha Franklin and her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, and The Staple Singers, when I promoted concerts in Little Rock, Hot Springs and Pine Bluff, during the time when Aretha only had one record out,” Bell recalls.
“I never shall forget that when we finished the performance at Robinson Auditorium, and the Rev. Franklin said, ‘You know, this is the first time I’ve been paid $1,000 for one performance in my life.’ We had to turn away people, it was a great performance.
“And I remember when Mavis Staples performed a song by herself. It was ‘On My Way to Heaven Anyhow,’ and she started crying, and I was looking at her, and I started crying, too. I felt what she was feeling, or something in the way she sang that song penetrated me and it’s still there today. As soon as I could get in a position to bring her into Stax Records and record her, I did. Those are the things that have resonated with me through the years.”
BACK TO MEMPHIS
As Bell became more and more influential on the East Coast, he found himself spending more time playing and promoting the artists on the Stax label. Before long, he was invited back to Memphis to be the label’s first promotion man, a job he eagerly accepted, despite the pay cut he took when he left Washington. It turned out to be a golden era for hit singles on Stax, but Bell had his eye on a new challenge: creating the first soundtrack to feature music by black artists.
“It was the era of what they called black-exploitation films,” Bell says, “and Shaft was about to come out. I thought Isaac Hayes would be perfect for the music for that, so I asked the people in charge, who kept turning us down. We persisted, and finally we heard that they had no budget for it, so I said ‘OK, we’ll do it,’ and that’s when they said if we paid for it, they’d let us do it.
“We got Isaac, and we flew all the musicians to Memphis to record it there so it would sound right. And we did what was new at the time, marketing things like billboards on [Hollywood’s] Sunset Boulevard advertising the soundtrack.”
Kerry Gordy, the son of Motown founder Berry Gordy, remembers learning the ropes from both his father and Bell as he grew up around such musical movers and shakers.
“When Al put out that Shaft soundtrack, it was a time when at most, soundtracks would maybe sell around 40,000 copies,” Gordy says. “But Al pulled off a lot of marketing tactics and promoted it so well that it outgrossed the movie. And when Richard Pryor put out an album named That Nigger’s Crazy, obviously Al was not going to be able to get that on the radio. So he promoted it to barbershops, beauty shops and coffeehouses that would play it, and it sold a couple of million units when 20,000 was the norm in comedy.”
James Alexander, who was not aboard the plane that crashed and took the lives of Otis Redding and four of the other five members of The Bar-Kays, played bass on the Academy Award-winning theme for Shaft. Alexander recalls how much wisdom he absorbed from Bell at Stax.
“He took me under his wing, and I was like a sponge,” Alexander says. “Down through the years, all that stuff he told me has come in handy. Al’s probably one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met and a bigbrother type of person I hold in high esteem.”
By 1969, Bell was a co-owner of the Stax label, buying out one of the two founders.
SONG WITH SPECIAL MEANING
When it came to writing songs himself, one in particular has special meaning to Bell. The circumstances surrounding “I’ll Take You There” were somewhat unusual, he explains.
“I had a problem at a point in my life reconciling death,” he says. “I was realizing a lot of death in my family with my brothers. One died as a child, right after he was born, from double pneumonia. Another was murdered. Another was murdered after that, and when that happened, something happened with me, inside of me.
“I was getting ready to go to Muscle Shoals to record the Staple Singers and I canceled it. I came to North Little Rock, went all over this town, looking for the person I thought murdered my brother. After I found the person, I realized that he did not murder my brother. By this time, it was the evening before the funeral and I hadn’t spent any time preparing for the funeral. I went to the service and came back, and I didn’t feel comfortable being there. I went to the backyard where my father had an old school bus, a relic. He kept it there just to remind himself where he had come from.
“I sat on the hood of that bus, thinking about my brother’s death, and all of a sudden, I started hearing in my head the bass lines of ‘I’ll Take You There,’ and I started hearing the music, and all of the words came next. It all came through me, but it’s really just one verse. I could never come up with anything else that would work, so there are no changes in the song.”
Honors began piling up for Bell as early as 1971, when his peers in radio named him Executive of the Year at the Bill Gavin Radio Program Conference. A year later Ebony magazine cited him as one of the 100 Most Influential Black Men. In 1973, his film Wattstax was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Documentary.
“I had picked up quite a bit of awareness when I was involved with Shaft, one of the first black films to really make a splash,” Bell recalls.
By 2002, Bell’s home state and Memphis, the city where he rose to fame, took notice of his achievements, as the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame inducted him. In the Tennessee metropolis, he received the W.C. Handy Lifetime Achievement Award.
William Bell, one of the Stax hit makers, made a name for himself with his debut single, “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” and with Booker T. Jones cowrote Albert King’s biggest hit, “Born Under a Bad Sign.” William Bell — who also had a change of name — credits Al Bell for the label’s successful surge.
“Al was always a dynamic high-energy wheeler-dealer go-getter,” says William Bell. “He became the driving force and energized everybody. If he said we could do something, we knew we could. During the civilrights era, we were in the thick of that. I think Al wanted to be a preacher. I used to tell him that he missed his calling; he should have been a preacher.”
A SPECIAL CHRISTMAS GIFT
On Christmas Day 1963, Bell married the former Lydia Mae Purifoy. They have two sons, Gregory Bernard Isbell and Jonathan Louis Isbell. Each son has a son of his own: Colby Alvertis Isbell and Dylan Isbell, respectively.
Mable John, a former Raelette behind Ray Charles, had a solo career at Stax that included a notable hit, “Your Good Thing Is About to End.” Cast in John Sayles’ 2007 movie, Honeydripper, she is the oldest sister of rhythm and blues legend Little Willie John. Unlike her Arkansas-born brother, she was born just across the line in Louisiana. She remembers Bell as a “deep thinker,” even when she met him during his college days in Little Rock.
“I went to the radio station to see if he would play my first record I had released on Motown,” John says. “And I was struck by how concerned he was about what was going on with people. After that, I didn’t see him for a long time. When I did, it was to see about signing a deal with Stax Records, and I went to their offices, and there he was.
“He was born years ahead of his time, and I don’t think some folks have understood what he was talking about, but he’s helped turn a lot of folks’ lives around. He inspired a lot of us to shoot for the stars and he’s been like a big brother, friend and gentleman.
“When I went in to Stax, I didn’t have any idea what to do, but David Porter and Isaac Hayes asked me what was going on in my life, and I told them about my marriage, and it was my story, and we made it into a song and that became a hit, thanks to Al turning me over to David and Isaac.”
Porter, who together with Hayes wrote numerous hit songs, including “Soul Man,” “Hold on I’m Comin’” and “I Thank You” for Sam & Dave, has similar recollections of a man he first heard on Memphis radio in the early 1960s.
“He had come over here from a Little Rock station, and right away, Al became an impactful voice in Memphis radio,” Porter says, “Not just for his quality programming, but also for his insightfulness. I was amazed at his ability to get records played and exposed. He understood quality music, how to create it and promote it.”
GOING DIGITAL
As happens in the music business, Stax Records eventually fell on hard times and Bell moved on to other challenges, spending time as the head of Motown Records and then starting a new label, Bellmark Records. Nowadays, he has what he calls “a new paradigm” for the music industry.
“I’ve been working on this since 1999,” he says. “I knew changes were going to have to be made. The creative part was gone, and all that was left was the commerce, the mass merchandising, like fast food. The industry had not noticed that something called ‘Napster’ had been born. So what we are at work on will be called ‘Al Bell Presents.’ So far I have signed, among others, The Dramatics, who were a Stax act.”
Bell refers those interested to his Web site www.albellpre sents.com.
Onzie Horne, executive director of the Beale Street Merchants Association in Memphis, has seen Bell busily at work through the days of Stax and Motown and more recent pursuits.
“He’s on the cutting edge of digital strategies these days,” Horne says. “Even though Al’s in Arkansas, he’s still a member of the Memphis Music Association, and when Al speaks, people stop and listen. We all just sit in awe. Al is in a unique position that is profound. He’s been steadfast in promoting and developing gospel music, which is close to my heart.”
Though his decisions have often been questioned and mocked, Bell’s favorite naysayer incident occurred when he insisted on having Isaac Hayes perform the theme from Shaft live at the Academy Awards ceremony. A movie mogul told him, “’Mr. Bell, I really think you’re losing your mind.’ And I told him I was a lone wolf and I didn’t run with the herd, plus I didn’t follow the parameters and I didn’t intend to lose on that.
“Well, Isaac got the Oscar that night and it was the first time a musician had ever been given an Oscar and the second time an Oscar had ever been given to a black person. The next day we sold 1 million records in one day.”

SELF PORTRAIT
Al Bell
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH March 15, 1940, Brinkley
MY GREATEST WEAKNESS IS My greatest love, being a workaholic, according to my wife. But I figure I was blessed to have an avocation that became my vocation.

MY WORST HABIT IS Eating at midnight, maybe my one meal of the day.

FOR MY LAST MEAL, I WOULD HAVE Chicken and fish, as in crappie, bass or bream. I am a bream nut. And the chicken has to be fried right, like my wife can do.

IF I COULD LIVE ANYWHERE OUTSIDE ARKANSAS It would be in Switzerland or Jamaica.

MY FAVORITE SONG THAT I WROTE IS “I’ll Take You There,” by The Staple Singers. It was written through me. I can’t carry a tune in a vacuum-packed can.

MY FAVORITE SONG THAT I DIDN’T WRITE IS “Save Your Love For Me,” by Bobby “Blue” Bland.

MY FAVORITE HIT SINGLE I WAS INVOLVED WITH IS
Prince’s “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.”

GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY WOULD BE Berry Gordy, Richard Pryor, Barbra Streisand, Mavis Staples, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Morgan Freeman.

MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS John F. Kennedy.

MY FAVORITE CONCERT TOUR THAT I WAS PART OF CAME
When we took the Stax-Volt Revue throughout Europe.

IF I’VE LEARNED ANYTHING IT’S That if you get knocked down, get back up, as well as that you must live one day at a time and get the best out of that day, since that day is not promised.

PEOPLE WHO KNEW ME IN HIGH SCHOOL THOUGHT I WAS
A pretty talented guy, but not in sports. So I started spending time with the girls and fell in love with the sciences (physics, chemistry, biology).

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Spiritual.