THE
STORY OF CARGOE
Beautiful
Sounds and Memphis Blues
CHAPTER FIVE: The Painful Look Back and.....
"For
instance, each year, the local newspaper has what they call The
Spot Awards," said Wisley. "They have a Friday
supplement called The Spot, an entertainment magazine, and the
readers vote each year for the local talent in various
categories. Each year, they have a show they call The
Spotlight. Last year, it was the Guitar Gods, three of the
best guitarists around and one happened to be Frank Brown, who we
back up on occasion. The year before, it was The Divas, four
ladies who really belt out tunes. We taught them some Beatles
tunes and they did some of their things. It's a great show
and lots of fun.
"Just this past year, Bill and
I put together some tunes that we've had over the years. We
went down and made a sort of demo that could have been part of
Cargoe's second album. Some of the songs have potential, others
are just okay.
"You see, by the second album, we
were really thinking about where we were going to take the sound
and what we were going to do. We had some tunes in the
pipeline that probably would have really worked and would have had
more of a commercial feel to it.
"We had maybe
enough written for half an album. They were just songs that
we would write and try to work up. There was no discussion
about, okay, when the next record comes up, we're going to put
these down. Tommy had a song called Tight Pants Desire.
'...for fancy body magic.' It was a neat little tune. Bill
had a couple and I had a couple."
As for Tommy
Richard, it is reported that he still plays around Tulsa. "The
last I saw him," Peters recalled, "he was sitting in a
little Tulsa club, just playing jazz guitar. Still good,
still into it, but no aspirations whatsoever to make money with it
or be a professional on the road or anything."
Looking
back on the experience, Phillips and Wisley see and feel the good
and the bad, but as with most such instances, the ones
most memorable are those closest to the skin.
Questions had been
submitted to Phillips and Wisley before the actual
interview. "When I looked at these questions,"
Phillips said, "I thought, man, I haven't thought about some
of this stuff for thirty years. It about wipes me out. You
know, life goes on and so do we, but that's where you go, man,
some of these memories are too painful, so I just won't think
about them."
Actually, they did think about
them, at least once. A number of years after the split-up,
Wisley got the guys together.
"We had some tunes
that would have been ready to go for a second album," Wisley
said, so I'd gotten together with Tom, and Tom and I were trying
to put something together, so I got Bill to come over. Tim
wasn't there, of course, but we played a little and talked about
doing something. I think I'd even called Peters and he'd
talked about going to Fry and trying to pull it back
together."
Peters had done just that. "Rob
and I were on different radio stations in Miami at the time,"
he recalled, "and we had an agreement to put the band back
together from the guys, so we called John Fry. He flew down
the next day with Chilton. Fry basically said that unless it
was certain that the band was back together, he did not want to
get involved."
And in typical Jim Peters
fashion, he made a point. "At the time, I told him that
I wasn't really certain that the mix they had gotten at Ardent was
really what was good for the band because the mix at Beautiful
Sounds, out-of-phase or not, was bigger and more powerful. The
recording were much simpler, so they could be bigger and more
powerful. The version of Time at Beautiful was huge. Rob
and I both loved guitar and we loved to get as much out of the
guitar sound as we could when we recorded. It sounded more
like today's music: the big power chords, the big
fill-the-room sound.
"To be fair, Manning did
achieve something that was not present in the Beautiful
recordings. But what we did at Beautiful was simpler, more
direct."
Robert W. Walker agreed, stating simply
that he believed the Beautiful tapes were the definitive tapes
recorded by the band.
Unfortunately, those tapes have been lost. Dan Penn, in the many moves he has made since leaving Memphis, has said that he has no idea where they might be, but he does not have them. Perhaps they are stored in the corner of some garage somewhere, awaiting discovery. Until they are found, we will never know.
WHILE THE BAND PLAYED, THE LABEL ...
"If
you're looking for an answer as to why this whole operation
failed, I think you could say that the final cause was my having
the bad judgment to make the Stax deal like I did to begin
with."
-- JOHN FRY, owner, Ardent Studios,
co-owner, Ardent Records, 1970-1974
Ardent Records was the dream child of John Fry and
Terry Manning. Having built a very successful recording
operation in the studios and both being into music, they decided
to tap the pop talent that existed within the confines of Memphis
and, hopefully later, the world. They had tried being a minor
league contributor to the major labels' catalogues, but it was
easier said than done and, in the end, they simply decided to do
it themselves.
To do that, they needed a distribution
setup and, luckily or unluckily depending on how you view it, Stax
had one ready-made, just down the way.
"We had
known all the people at Stax for a long time," Fry
said. "They had been our good friends and our good
customers at the recording studios and we thought a lot of
them. Al Bell and Jim Stewart, who were the top executives
there, I think were responsive in some degree to what we were
doing," so a deal was signed.
"Under
the terms of the distribution agreement, Stax would own the
masters. Any masters that were actually delivered to them and
deemed satisfactory for release and put out became property of
Stax."
When the Cargoe and Big
Star albums were finally released, things at first looked
promising. Both bands gained positive attention in the
trade press and Cargoe's single even charted in Cash Box and
Record World, which were smaller Billboard type magazines. Feel
Alright (Ardent changed the spelling to one 'L'), having
charted at stations in Memphis and Tulsa with the Beautiful
single, repeated the trick, jumping once again into the Top Ten in
those markets with the remake. Eventually, word would get to
the band members that other stations had it moving up their
charts, one station in Hawaii reporting it as high as #5.
Fry
was pleased and Manning, when he wasn't in the studio, seemed
happy, but it would not be long before the elation faded. As
sales numbers came in, Fry was stunned. There weren't
any. Somewhere between the studio and the stores, something
had gone wrong. In between phone calls and trips to various record
stores, it became obvious what the trouble was: there were no
records in the stores.
Stax, handled through
independent distributors at the time, was expert at marketing to
the R&B market, "but certainly the people who worked
there did not understand at all what was going on with this kind
of music," Fry conceded. "They had never had any
success with records directed toward the kind of market we were
appealing to. What they had been doing was entirely different --
they were working in an entirely different area and they just
were not prepared to help us. At the same time, we were not
prepared to help ourselves. Now, we gradually got to the
place where we were prepared to help ourselves, as far as
promotion was concerned. At one point, we had four full-time
people in promotion and generated a lot of radio airplay on some
of the product, but we were never in a position where we could
control the sales and distribution aspect. There was never
anything you could call a coordinated marketing program and we
never had any appreciable success in having product available in
the areas where records were being played on the radio.
"After
we'd been with Stax for six or eight months, I guess they made a
deal to pull out of the independents and go through CBS. We
had only one distribution agreement, of course, and that was with
Stax. Later, the question developed into which distributor
handled Stax."
"Ardent Records was
just a few people with a very small staff in a small town in the
South," explained Manning, "distributed by, yes, a
bigger record company, but the company that distributed us was a
black music company. Basically, they had Otis Redding and Sam
& Dave and Isaac Hayes ... some of the greatest soul music of
all-time ... some of the greatest music of all-time. But
no one involved had a lot of acumen relating to the pop music
business, the rock music business. We were trying to go up
against Columbia, Warner Brothers, RCA -- big names with big money
and big staff, with lots of resources behind them. Yes, it
can be done and sometimes, occasionally, small labels have turned
into big labels. This, sadly, was not one of those
cases."
"When CBS took over Stax
distribution," Fry went on, "I suppose the Cargoe album
was pulled off the market. It was still in the catalogue and if
someone had tried hard enough, they could have ordered it. CBS,
based on sales (or lack of sales) up to that time, did not elect
to press any Cargoe product and put it in their inventory. Now,
Stax had some inventory and could have supplied any orders that
they received, but it was not put in to the CBS distribution
system like it was a current release or an item in someone's
catalogue for which there was a demand, because. frankly, there
wasn't. At least, they thought so. Whether they were
correct is another matter."
Whereas Cargoe's LP
virtually disappeared overnight (at least, in the areas where it
had appeared at all), Big Star remained. CBS had added their
record to the inventory and, when Radio City was
released, presented it to the public. The result was no
better than what had happened under the independents. A
little airplay, no records, and finally, no airplay. Thus it
was with the other Ardent releases, Brian Alexander Robertson's
Wringing Applause and The Hot Dogs' Say What
You Mean.
Frustration eventually not
only replaced the initial hopes, it shrouded the entire Ardent
operation.
"You could imagine the effect on the
artist," Fry lamented. "There were a lot of places
somewhat secretive about what exactly goes on. We had the
type of situation where people could walk in at any time and be
just as well-informed with what was going down as far as the
business end of it as they wanted to be. And when they would
hear some of the stuff that was going down as far as distribution
was concerned, it did little to help their level of enthusiasm
about what they were working on.
"The situation
with Stax deteriorated steadily from the time they made the CBS
deal, not only with our records, but also with their own
releases. By the time you went through the bureaucracy at
Stax and then went through the much larger one at CBS, the
situation was just impossible. Then Stax began to encounter
some financial difficulties (tied in with the Union Planters Bank
scandal). At the same time, we at Ardent had grown rather
disgruntled. After beating your head against the wall for a
certain length of time, you discover that it hurts and you don't
want to do it anymore.
"I mean, you had to
be there to appreciate the organization, or lack of it, that Stax
had. And I'm not trying to be bitter about it or anything else,
but it was just unbelievable.
"At that time, to
be frank with you, there was a little friction between Terry and
myself because it was his opinion that we ought to stick with Stax
to the bitter end. I said I can't take it anymore, so you go
your way and I'll go mine and that was where we left it. But
we're still on good terms."
Manning did
continue. Stax made a deal with him to distribute Privilege,
a label that he ran until Stax folded, sometime in the late
seventies.
Both Fry and Manning were crushed by what
happened, as were the bands involved. It was earth-shattering,
true, but there were some positives.
"(Positive
critical response) was the only gratifying part of the
experience," said Fry. "That was the only thing that you
had to kind of keep you going. But at the same time, it was a
source of great frustration. It would be easy for me to
understand if you put a record out and no one had anything to say
about it or everyone wrote it up and said it was the worst thing
they'd ever heard. But when you have people saying all these
nice things about you and you're not selling records, it really
makes you sure that there is something bad wrong.
"If
you want to get to the bottom of the distribution thing, I have a
file about three inches thick of letters that came in during the
times that these things were released. The records were on
the market, they were being written about in the trade and
consumer magazines. The letters came in from everywhere you
could imagine. Basically, they said I desperately want to buy
this record and they can't order it. When you stop and think
about how hard it is for some guy out there who isn't in the
record business to just secure our address. Getting our
address in Memphis is not as easy as getting that of CBS in New
York. Considering how fickle the public usually is, I've
often wondered by what factor I should multiply to come up with
the number of albums we should have sold. If somebody went to
that much trouble, we would usually send them the record for
free. I think we may have distributed more that way than we
actually sold.
"I saw the records
as cut-outs in stores. There was a time that I went into
Peaches, which was a big record store in Fort Lauderdale. They
had tons of Cargoe and both Big Star albums and even
some Hot Dogs in their cut-outs. It blew me away. I
didn't expect to see that, but I suppose that anyone who wanted
them could have gone in and handed them two bucks for a
copy.
"After we folded the label, we did have
some foreign inquiries. It is strange that the foreign
distributors who contracted with Stax were universally
disinterested in doing anything with us, but there were other
foreign distributors who would have released the records. By
virtue of the fact that Stax had an exclusive arrangement with
other people for those foreign territories, nothing was ever done
along those lines. The only things released on foreign soil
to my knowledge, was the Cargoe 45 in Canada and a four song EP by
Big Star in Brazil. We had no idea about the Brazil release
until it was brought to our attention. They didn't even send
to us for a tape. They took an album and mastered the EP by
playing back the record.
"I eventually got so
disgusted with the whole thing at the time that the distribution
thing was falling apart and Stax was going out of business that I
made a deal to sell the studio to some people. I was
completely out of the business for about six months and then they
went broke, so I got back in. I suppose it's tempting to get
back in to the record business, but on the other hand that thing
was such a miserable and frustrating experience that I'm not
entirely sure I'd want to run the risk of repeating it."
Since
the interview with John Fry, which took place in 1977, Fry
resurrected Ardent Records as a Christian rock label, which is
headed by Jody Stephens.
CHAPTER
ONE: Living On Tulsa Time...
CHAPTER
TWO: Into the Mystic...
CHAPTER
THREE: The Things We Dream Today...
CHAPTER
FOUR: Delusion and Dissolution...
CHAPTER
SIX: Such Is the Power of Music...
Supporting the Indies Since 1969
