Jesse Jackson and Isaac Hayes at Wattstax festival Photograph: Stax Records “Luckily our chief attorneys had put a clause in the contract so they couldn’t get out of the agreement.” Once it became clear that Wattstax would, in fact, draw a huge audience “they came to us and said, ‘you can’t perform here,’’ Bell said. But this was before Stax got busy promoting the hell out the show on Black radio and newspapers, in the streets and in the skies, with streamers advertising it behind prop planes. He believes that the Coliseum people only agreed to let the show happen there because they didn’t think it would draw that many people. “They thought of me as this Black boy from a little record company in Tennessee,” Bell said. If that first seemed like a pipe dream to them, it struck the folks at the venue that they wound up securing – the Los Angeles Coliseum - as downright laughable.

But as Stax began talking to local people, and once they got all of their own stars on board, they became more ambitious, believing they might have a shot at filling a stadium. When they, and the other organizers, started to brainstorm an event, they eyed venues with capacities of just 2,500. The company had just opened its first west coast office, and the person charged with running it, Forrest Hamilton (son of the famed jazz drummer Chico Hamilton), was the one who had the idea to build on Jacquette’s original Watts festival. Stax’s mission to counter that mindset began modestly. Many white people, if they would see two Black people walk together, they’d think there’s going to be a problem. Besides helping the people of the area, Bell also wanted to create an event that would “let the world see the kind of people we really are. It frightened me but I also knew very well what gave rise to it.”īell himself had been stopped by the Memphis police multiple times, for no reason he said, mirroring the incident of police harassment that sparked the Watts uprising. “I hadn’t seen that kind of rebellion before. “It was all over television,” he recalled. Regardless, Al Bell had been determined to do something for the Watts community ever since he saw that area erupt in flames in 1965. “We were coming from the other side of the country, from Memphis, and we had never done anything like this before.” “We were trying to do the unimaginable,” added Deanie Parker, who handled the label’s publicity and who helped organize the event. “This was an enormous undertaking for us,” said Al Bell, who was Stax Records’ president at the time and who is not related to William Bell. Then again, it’s amazing that the event took place at all given the many obstacles its organizers faced.

“There was so much great music that people who weren’t there didn’t get to hear.” “It’s an answer to a prayer,” said Wanda Hutchinson of the vocal group The Emotions, who performed at the event. The latter is especially meaningful because so much of the music had never come out before. Now, for their fiftieth anniversary, the Wattstax film is returning to theaters joined by a new box set that, for the first time, includes all six hours of the original show. The event, during which not a single violent act took place, was captured in a documentary and a live album that each became classics. In 1972, Stax Records and its artists – including Bell, Isaac Hayes, the Staples Singers, The Bar-Kays and others – returned to Watts to create a benefit concert, dubbed Wattstax, that drew over 100,000, mainly local people. Little did he know that seven years later, that modest festival would balloon into something enormous and enduring. In the wake of the rubble, young community leader Tommy Jacquette created an annual Watts Summer Festival meant to benefit the area and bolster the citizens. On the other, the protests spiraled into a melee that involved mass arson, looting and shootings that left 34 people dead and a community in greater despair than ever. On the one hand, what became known as the Watts Riots of 1965 – referred to by others as the Watts Uprising – made clear to the world the depth of anger that Black citizens felt over the racism they experienced in everything from policing to housing to education. Several weeks later it did in a way so profound it made history – for both righteous and ruinous reasons.

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