“We’re speaking out in the open now,” says the legendary R&B keyboardist, whose new book complicates the golden age of soul
is also a relentlessly honest portrayal of Jones’ often-turbulent tenure at Stax Records that does much to dispel, or at least complicate, the myth of Stax as a harmonious cross-cultural utopia. “My band became the ‘face’ of racial harmony, literally and figuratively,” Jones writes. “That has placed an inordinate amount of pressure on me to reassure the constituencies that it was indeed the case and confirm that the conception is accurate.
At Stax, there was an infusion of the knowledge of composition through me to my partners. The songs got some structure, I think, subconsciously, through me, through the knowledge I acquired through learning and studying music from the past: European music, African music, Eastern music, all the things that I learned at Indiana that I wouldn’t have gotten out of the air. Stax was a mix of that expression, like you said, and some structural Bach and some Mozart.
I was just about to get on my spiritual quest: meditating, figuring out who I was, what I was. What’s going on here? What are my limitations? I wrote the song “Ole Man Trouble” [eventually recorded by Stephen Stills]. It was, “I’m not going to work on Maggie’s Farm anymore,” basically. Al Bell was leading a company that he wanted to build into a giant. That was his thing which is good. I wanted that too. I recorded this song.
Constant subconscious prioritizing about what the goal is, what the purpose is. We did that for years. That’s what happens a lot. We’re speaking out in the open now, but we weren’t speaking out in the open back then. We were just working towards the higher purpose, which was making music. And the music probably ultimately did more than if we had broken it down and argued about politics or race.Exactly. But we were about to make “Green Onions.
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