WBGO is celebrating Stax Records thanks to a new partnership with Concord.
Concord, which acquired the legendary Memphis label as part of its purchase of Fantasy Records in 2004, has since honored Stax's unique legacy, releasing definitive collections, rare performances, unreleased tracks and more, in deluxe, new packages.
The HBO Original Documentary Series STAX: SOULSVILLE U.S.A. is now available on HBO Max.
Rob Bowman, Grammy Award-winning professor, producer of the documentary mini-series and author of Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records (2003) joined WBGO News Director Doug Doyle to talk about the project.
"This is massively important to me. I started working on what Stax Records was back in 1983, so we're talking 41 years ago. I spent 12 years virtually interviewing every artist, every session musician, everyone who worked in the front office as well as the three owners Estelle Axton, Jim Stewart and of course Al Bell. It's been an amazing journey. When I started there were eight books on Motown but nobody had written anything on Stax."
Bowman is featured prominently in STAX: SOULSVILLE U.S.A.
"Stax was a label that had both black and white participants from the studio band to the company office staff and eventually to the ownership. That said, Stax was making Black music. The white musicians who worked there had backgrounds in various types of music like Steve Cropper's guitar in Booker T. & the MG's. All of those white musicians were aficionados and fans who were intoxicated with the magic of Black R & B. That's how they started to work together. It was kind of an oasis of racial sanity."
When Jim Stewart started Stax Records he quickly found out that his musical idea wasn't going to work.
"Jim (Stewart) was a country fiddler. All he knew was country music. He started a label in emulation of Sam Phillips of Sun Records. This label was going to be a country and pop label. He did about 11 singles that without execution were all failures. Most of the country records were pretty poor.
He was originally recording in his uncle's garage. He eventually decided they had to be in the city. They rented an old abandoned movie theater on McLemore Avenue in a Memphis neighborhood that had been white but was rapidly turning to totally black. David Porter (famous Stax producer) talks about in the film that we has bagging groceries across the street and he sees a recording studio opening right in his neighborhood. Booker T. Jones starts hanging out in the record store that Estelle opened just to get some cash flow going while the studio was getting in gear. So many people from an impossibly, richly and musically talented neighborhood stumbled into it initially and then word spread like rapid fire. If you're a musician and Black, this is a place where you can get an opportunity."
Eventually Booker T. Jones created a new sound at Stax and Booker T. & the MG's had a smash hit in "Green Onions".
"Booker had been fiddling around with this incredible cool riff that is not major and not minor, it's a really interesting riff if you look at it musically. He's just playing around and the rest of the band starts jamming on it and suddenly they have this incredible record. 'Green Onions' is a massive hit that changes everything."
Eventually, a young little-known soul singer named Otis Redding who becomes a huge part of the Stax story.
"Otis Redding is the seminal artist in that first period, not taking anything away from Booker T. & the MG's, Rufus Thomas, Eddie Floyd and William Bell. All of them point to Otis. Otis lit that studio up."
Rob Bowman stresses in the HBO doc STAX: SOULSVILLE U.S.A. that the Stax sound exploded when Otis Redding performed at the Monterey International Pop Festival in California in 1967. It seemed like a strange venue for Redding to perform, especially before a predominantly white audience that had just listened to the psychedelic sounds of rock band Jefferson Airplane.
"Otis, Booker T. & the MG's and the horns come on stage with suits, as straight as can be. It was culture shock when they out to Monterey with all these hippies smoking grass and hair flying, blowing bubbles and paint on face. It was like where did we just land? Otis hits that stage and calls the audience the 'love people' and goes immediately into Sam Cooke's 'Shake' which is just a barnburner when Otis did that and had the audience on its feet within probably 30-45 seconds and the rest of the set is magic."
Otis Redding became one of the greatest soul singers of all-time before dying in a plane crash in Madison, Wisconsin at the age of 26. The December, 1967 plane crash into Lake Monona killed Redding, his pilot, a young assistant and four teenaged members of his band the Bar-Kays.
The iconic "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay", a song co-written by Otis Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper, was released on Stax Records' Volt label in 1968, becoming the first posthumous #1 single in the US.
Another huge moment in the history of Stax Records comes as a result of producers Isaac Hayes and David Porter teaming up new Stax artists Sam & Dave.
Bowman says when Sam & Dave came to Stax in 1965 they had recorded eight singles already for other small labels in Florida, but none of them had made much noise and frankly they weren't the same quality as what they did at Stax, partially because they didn't have an Isaac Hayes and David Porter to work with. Isaac and David wrote those songs like 'Soul Man'. These were just gold soul singles. They wrote them. They produced them. Isaac and David hadn't done anything truly mind-boggling until they got together with Sam & Dave. It became a magical foursome."
Bowman say the Stax story nearly ended after co-founder Jim Stewart signed a contract that he never read and eventually would lead to the label losing all of its artists.
"Once Stax severed its distribution agreement with Atlantic Records and Jerry Wexler which was May 1968 once Atlantic was sold they found out that Atlantic owned all the masters, all the Otis Redding recordings, all the Sam and Dave, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the MG's, everything they had distributed at that point was gutted. Unbelievably, they built it back into something even bigger."
You can SEE Doug Doyle's entire conversation with Rob Bowman here.
