…a.k.a. “Soulsville U.S.A.,” and whose roster included Isaac Hayes, Booker T & the M.G.s, Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding.
Stax went belly-up in the '70’s, but its music will always be with us.
The Stax label was of vital significance in another way – as an example of racial harmony (more or less), where white and black musicians worked side-by-side, in a still-segregated South.
Damn! I don’t know how I missed this obituary.
This is the sort of thread I would start (and then watch it wither and die), so it’s my duty to jump in here.
As many of you know from my previous posts, I’m a geezer. I graduated from high school in Atlanta in 1969, and the music of the 60’s had a profound effect on me, but none so profound as the music that came out on the Stax/Volt label.
I grew up in the waning days of the Jim Crow South. I remember “colored” bathrooms and water fountains from when I was a little boy. And although I grew up in the city of Martin Luther King, Jr., it was not Dr. King who was the driving force in making my adolescent mind realize that racism was wrong, but rather Hank Aaron, James Brown and Otis Redding – especially Otis Redding. These people confirmed in my teenage mind that people who thought a person was inferior because he wasn’t white were idiots.
From 1964 when I brought home my first Otis Redding 45 to his death in late 1967, Otis was a personal idol. Incidentally, I had to listen to those 45s when there was no one else around, because in our house that sort of music was forbidden. My parents were the type of people with the idiotic notions I refer to in the previous paragraph.
I’ve written in other threads how after then plane crash that took Otis Redding’s life, my friend Alan and I were so broken up we ditched school to drive down to Macon and attend Otis’s funeral. There were over 4,000 people packed into the Macon City Auditorium that day, and only a few hundred of them were white. And of those few hundred I think we were the only two 16 year-old high school kids from Atlanta. That was 37 years ago and I remember it like yesterday: Aretha Franklin sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and Booker T. Jones played “How Great Thou Art” on the auditorium organ. It was an amazingly moving experience.
Other Stax/Volt artists - Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Booker T & the MG’s, William Bell, Rufus Thomas, the Bar-Kays, Albert King, not to mention the Atlantic artists who recorded in Memphis (in its heyday, Stax/Volt was an Atlantic subsidiary): Aretha Franklin, Wilson Picket, Percy Sledge – had an impact on me as well. I think listening to this “forbidden” music caused me to question authority in other ways that made me receptive to psychedelic music later in the 60s and the counterculture in general. It’s instructive that Otis Redding was the only soul singer to perform at 1967’s seminal “Summer of Love” event, the Monterrey Pop Festival.
And were it not for Estelle Axton, Otis Redding may have never been recorded. Or if he were, it might not have been in such an environment that allowed him to reach out to a 13 year-old white boy in Atlanta. I can never thank Estelle Axton enough.
Rest in peace, Mrs. Axton. You always were on the side of the angels. Now you’re with them.
For a splendid compilation of what Stax/Volt was all about, see The Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968.
Trivia: Axton’s son Charles “Packy” Axton was one of the founding members of the Bar-Keys. The Bar-Keys not only provided Stax with one of its very first big hits (“Last Night”) they brought bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, trumpeter Wayne Jackson, and guitarist Steve Cropper to the label. These three (along with keyboardist Booker T, drummer Al Jackson, and sax player Andrew Love) were the nucleus of the amazing Stax house band, heard on countless hits.
(Packy, meanwhile, left the Mar-Keys to form the Packers, who had a great if incredibly obscure hit with "Hole in the Wall.)
Lovely posts, guys!
I have a Stax compilation CD with the following twenty tracks (Stax trax!):
I remember the first time I played through that disc, wondering “what’s ‘Green Onions’ all about, anyway?” before getting to it, and then hearing the first riff and thinking, “Oh, so that’s ‘Green Onions’! I never knew what that one was called!”.
Then I reexamined the one album (yeah, I know, pitiful) of Albert King that I have, King of the Blues Guitar. At first glance it’s an Atlantic release, but the liner notes reveal that it was recorded at Stax with the Memphis Horns – all Stax guys.
Probably my happiest Stax discovery is a Sam and Dave song (from their LP Soul Men – as reissued on Atlantic, those bastards), “Rich Kind of Poverty”. Something about that song – the emotionally frank lyrics, the musical exuberance – just gets me. Thematically, it’s like an R&B alternative to “All You Need is Love,” without the latter’s insipid stupidity.
Remember that great scene from High Fidelity, when Rob’s girlfriend is asking him questions about his job wish list? One of his top picks was (paraphrasing) “musician… doesn’t have to be anybody famous. I’d settle for just being one of the Memphis Horns or something”.