Anyone who ever visited the razed site of Stax Studios at East McLemore Avenue and College Street in South Memphis, and stood there shuffling feet in the gravel and powdery bits of floor tile that remained after the Southside Church of God in Christ had the building torn down two decades ago, could learn to curse the historical marker that stands there to this day.
In many ways, this excellent two-disc box, Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration, which marks Concord’s resurrection of the label, is a similar monument, doing service to history while floating above it, free of the dust and dried sweat of the real thing. The remastered sound is superb; one marvels at the clarity of Al Jackson’s drums in 1969’s “Time Is Tight”. The marvelously dry sound of Eddie Floyd’s 1966 “Knock On Wood” exposes the overstatement of just about any other three minutes of pop one could name. Confining itself to the hits, Stax 50th unwittingly illustrates one possible moral of the Stax story: By all means, let’s fuck with success.
Stax was shut down by court order in 1975 — a victim of institutionalized racism, greed, and that crazed ambition which has always characterized a city that essentially had re-created itself, at the turn of the 20th century, in no image but its own. By the time of its closing, the label had lost to early death its most emblematic personality, Otis Redding, and its most essential musician, Al Jackson. Long decamped was Booker T. Jones, the supremely gifted musician who had, on an off day, created by himself perhaps the most brilliant of all early Stax recordings, Eddie Floyd’s 1968 “Big Bird”, a lost artifact on a level with any experimental effort by the Byrds or the Beatles.
You won’t find “Big Bird”, or that other strangely avant-garde Eddie Floyd record, 1967’s “Don’t Rock The Boat” (in which the bridge is a dead ringer for something The Band would employ on its self-titled album two years later), on Stax 50th. Missing as well are great arcana such as Sir Mack Rice’s puckered-mouth tribute to young women, “Mini-Skirt Minnie”, and Wendy Rene’s hungry-sounding “Bar-B-Q”, her tip of the hat to the regional cuisine perfected in Memphis.
Of course, the relative merits of Memphis, North Carolina, Kansas City, and Texas barbecue engender as much debate as do the competing but intertwined aesthetics of Muscle Shoals, Detroit, and Memphis soul music. The classic Stax aesthetic was one of obliquity tempered by professionalism, so that Steve Cropper’s almost out-of-tune guitar commentary on Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” now sounds unlike anything else on any other soul record. The list of such details in the Stax discography is long. Such eccentricity was submerged at Motown, and comparing Stax and Motown is like contrasting dense, airy southern space with the oppressive clutter of the urbanized north.
Disc one of Stax 50th rolls out one hit after another. William Bell’s 1961 “You Don’t Miss Your Water” might be the greatest song to emerge from Stax. A perfect example of the way American musicians can create cross-pollinations unthinkable by the most populist politician, it went on to have another life as a prototypical example of country-rock on the Byrds’ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo.
Yet the Byrds cut their hair and stood on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry stage, and didn’t make any notable appearances in south Memphis. And the Beatles, whose “Got To Get You Into My Life” is a stiff approximation of Stax, almost recorded at 926 East McLemore, but didn’t make it. Rob Bowman, author of the invaluable Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story Of Stax Records (and of the Stax 50th liner notes), reports that Elvis Presley tried to cut there in 1973, and was mainly interested in watching sports on televisions he had installed in the studio, although no one involved seems to have lacked for hamburgers.
In short, Stax missed the boat even as its pool of talent, which went far beyond Cropper, Jones, Jackson, Redding, bassist Duck Dunn, and Isaac Hayes, created the future of popular music. In this, the company’s story again illustrates the Memphis anti-aesthetic shared by artists as disparate as Hayes and Presley.
By the end of disc one, Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love” has modernized the Stax sound. Its rhythmic insistence would presage disco, a music whose innovations were based upon those of hits such as Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft” and “Walk On By”. What had once been an aesthetic of simplicity, powered by Al Jackson’s metronomic yet humane drumming, became something altogether more monstrous.
The experimentalism of the Staple Singers’ 1971 “Respect Yourself” (recorded in Muscle Shoals and mixed for maximum subversion by engineer Terry Manning) and the oddball pop of Frederick Knight’s “I’ve Been Lonely For So Long” (recorded in Birmingham, Alabama) sum up the difficulties of Stax’s later period. This music seems closer to us than does, say, Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man”, and it’s more difficult to parse. I find later Stax grandiose, sad, full of feeling, and heroic — a music of thwarted ambition and dispersed energies.
That razed lot now sports a museum devoted to all things Stax. This is fitting. Musing 30 years ago over the destruction of Beale Street, Stanley Booth wrote, “Through the wisdom of its civic leaders, Memphis is once again nearing the point of being worthless enough to attract money.” What he meant, I think, is that a legacy as complex as that of Stax resists the price tag, the easy answers, our culture seems to demand. You can visit the museum and take the tour; you can listen to the music on the way over, and you may shuffle your feet in the dust when you get there.