The Satellite Record Shop took shape in the candy counter of the Capitol Theatre at 926 East McLemore, and it taught Stax Records what to make. Estelle Axton, a bank clerk, had mortgaged her home in the late 1950s so that her brother Jim Stewart, a fiddle player and bond salesman, could buy an Ampex recorder for his small label. When the operation moved from Brunswick into the empty Capitol in 1960, at $100 a month, the control room went on the stage and she turned the concession stand into a shop to bring in cash. The shop paid the rent, and it doubled as market research. Neighborhood teenagers came in to play new records for free, Booker T. Jones among them, and some drifted down the hall to the studio. Axton watched what they bought and why. When a record hit on another label, she said, the staff discussed what made it sell. When she believed in an instrumental called Last Night, she slipped a copy to a local station and then saw the demand appear at her own counter. The shop soon outgrew the candy stand and took over the vacant barbershop next door. Axton left Stax in 1969, had sold her shares by 1970, started the Fretone label in 1973, and died in 2004 at 85. The company she helped finance ended badly: a padlock went on the gate in January 1976 after a bankruptcy petition in December, and the building was razed in 1989. The Stax Museum of American Soul Music, opened in 2003, is a replica on the same lot.
Getting there
35.1158, -90.0312
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