The History of Stax Records

Soulsville U.S.A. by Rob Bowman & Respect Yourself by Robert Gordon

It was not until 1981, when I joined my first band, that I was really introduced to the music of the sixties. Even though I had been alive for twenty years already, other than the oldies hour on the local radio I had very little idea of what music had been popular during the first decade of my life. It was the bass player in that band--an electrical worker with a wife and two kids who had converted his garage into a practice space--who introduced me to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and, most significantly, Sam & Dave. Of course Motown flooded the airwaves during oldies shows and in the public mind during the seventies, but I could see immediately that there was something infinitely more attractive in the new/old music I was being introduced to through my bass player and comedy efforts like the Blues Brothers. Wilson Pickett, Eddie Floyd, and Booker T. and the M.G.s were like a bolt out of the blue, a revelation like I wouldn’t have again until I discovered the music of Horace Silver and Art Blakey yet another decade later--music that was more closely related to Southern Soul than I could imagine at the time. In fact, it wouldn’t be until I was thoroughly immersed in Hard Bop that I began lusting after a box set of music in the record store: The Complete Stax/Volt Singles, Volume 1, primarily because it contained at the time the only available recordings by the Mar-Keys, whose “Last Night” I had just recently discovered.

When I finally saved enough money to buy the set it was as if the heavens had opened. For a time, Rob Bowman’s extensive booklet of music notes and photographs that accompanied the set was the only history of this magical musical record company in existence. In the introduction to his own later book, Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records, Bowman says this in his introduction about his impetus to undertake the history of the label: “At the time that I began this project, there were eight books out on Motown, but not a single volume had been written about Stax.” Fortunately, it wasn’t quite the same for me. That first Stax set had been released in 1991, but I didn’t purchase it until sometime around 1996, and this led me inexorably back to Peter Guralnick’s seminal work on the music of the period, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. It’s a book that will never be equaled, written by the nonpareil music writer of our generation. But while the survey of all Southern soul music was fascinating, and necessary for my contextual understanding of Stax Records, it was frustrating in its absence of in-depth history of the label. I would only have to wait another year, however, before Bowman’s book was released and it has been my bible ever since. But this was only the tip of the iceberg, as a recent onslaught of books on music from Memphis have been written, including another history of the label, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon.

In the years since purchasing that first box set, I have subsequently collected the other two sets of the label’s complete singles, as well as every other disc of Stax music I could get my hands on. There is also a history of the label on DVD, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, and several concert recordings including the European tour from 1967 and WattStax from 1972, as well as reunion concerts available. So recently I began a side-by-side reading of the Bowman and Gordon books, and could not be happier. Though the Bowman book appears to have fewer pages, it was published in London and has an extremely small font which, compared with the more user-friendly font of the Gordon book, renders them about the same length. What is absolutely shocking about Bowman’s book is when he says in his introduction that while the book is “two-and-a-half times as long as my publisher wanted. It is also longer than I had envisioned, and yet I found that, even at this length, I had to leave out dozens and dozens of interesting stories that people had shared with me over the years.” One can only hope those stories will eventually find their way into print, perhaps as something like the oral history series of books by Dave Marsh that, incidentally, includes a volume on Sam & Dave.

Of the two books, Bowman’s is clearly the more academically oriented, and that is a positive thing, especially for someone like me who studied history as an undergraduate. He has clearly done more in-depth research and so every episode of the story is looked at from more than one angle by the participants involved. At the same time, he also indulges in much less speculation than Gordon, while Gordon’s book has endnotes that are so subjective that they are almost obtrusive. Bowman’s book is based on the extensive interviews that he conducted over a twelve-year period and is heavily footnoted, while Gordon’s is eerily reliant on interviews from the Stax documentary, which he wrote and directed. Which is not to take anything away from Gordon, but it does feel strange to see the words in print after recently watching the DVD. But while Bowman’s book is clearly superior, there are some things that Gordon’s account offers especially in the way of contextual interviews, with DJs, record manufacturers, the local barber, and the like. It’s a different way of telling the story, necessary when there is a smaller amount of interview material to work with. And while it sometimes feels as if he’s straying away from the point, which is the music, it does feel as if he’s viewing the story through a slightly wider lens. The inescapable fact remains, however, that Gordon’s book suffers from being written so much later, and it’s a flaw that can’t be overlooked.

In his introduction to the earlier book, Rob Bowman has this to say about the interview process, something that took over a dozen years for him to complete: “I have also become aware of a significant erosion in the memories of many of the people whom I have interviewed more than once. Details that in 1985 or 1986 came readily had all but vanished by 1996.” An example of this can be found in comparing the two books when it comes to the mythology surrounding the discovery of Otis Redding, the roadie for Johnny Jenkins who pestered Al Jackson into getting an audition and took everyone’s breath away the second he opened his mouth to sing. In Bowman’s book the author is rather blunt in his attempt to dispel this particular myth. By 1962 Otis had been singing professionally for years, and

          . . . all the factors crucial to Otis’s development, save for a record contract, were in place . . . Phil
          Walden [Jenkins’ manager] explains, “the plan was to make this follow up for Johnny Jenkins but
          also to give Otis a chance to sing. That was my understanding with [record distributor] Joe Galkin.”
          . . . In other words, Otis’s “chance” was very carefully arranged by Phil Walden in cahoots with Joe
          Galkin, a far cry from the romantic intercession of fate it was always purported to be.

Bowman’s recounting of the episode relies heavily on what one assumes is an earlier interview with label founder Jim Stewart, who recollected being underwhelmed with Otis’s audition, especially after working all day to get two good takes for the Jenkins record. “It was different, but I don’t think anybody really jumped up and down and said we’ve discovered a superstar. We were all tired . . . and the session was over, just like that.”

Of course Gordon was obliged to take this into consideration when writing his account. “While some were excited by the new signing, Jim felt more a sense of obligation than exuberance; as far as he was concerned, the deal was really about Joe Galkin, not Otis Redding.” But then Gordon repeats Steve Cropper’s oft-reported anecdote, “my hair lifted about three inches and I couldn’t believe this guy’s voice,” and says that Cropper had to run out to the street to coral the rest of the musicians who were heading for their evening gigs in order to record Otis. What is unforgivable, however, is that he follows this with a quote by Booker T. Jones: “When you’re in a moment like that, you’re not thinking that it’s gonna sell a lot of records . . . I’d never been with anybody that had that much desire to express emotion.” When Booker says “a moment like that,” he’s talking about those present at the audition, of course, but when he talks about Otis singing, he’s actually referring to the records they recorded later. In point of fact, Booker had already left for the day and wasn’t even at Otis’s audition, something Bowman makes a point of explaining. Gordon, on the other hand, elects to hide the truth in a quote by Stewart to the effect that “a couple of the musicians had already left,” without clarifying that one of them was Booker. While not exactly earth-shattering on its own, episodes like this tend to cast doubt on the veracity of Gordon’s writing throughout the book.

In terms of the label itself, the story is a tale of two record companies. The first begins in the late fifties with Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton trying to make records on nights and weekends while working at a bank during the day. After purchasing a defunct movie theater in a black section of Memphis, they eventually attracted both black and white musicians in a venture that most of the participants called an oasis from the racial discrimination that infected the rest of the city. They were making great music and in the search for a national distributor Stewart made a deal with the devil in the form of Jerry Wexler from Atlantic, who informed the company at the end of the decade that Atlantic actually owned all of their masters. Stax was suddenly a record company without any records. By the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination next door at the Beverly Hotel, the next phase of the label began. Stewart hired former black DJ Al Bell to assist him, and the seventies phase of the label was all about creating as many hit records in as short a space as possible. Miraculously, it worked, but it worked a little too well. The undoing of the label was a million dollar loan that they took out from a local Memphis bank. After paying back the entire loan early, the bank began loaning money to anyone even associated with Stax. By the mid-seventies, when the loans couldn’t be paid back, the story was over.

As fascinating as the history is, however, it would be nothing without the incredible music that Stax recorded during their fifteen-year existence. From self-discovered acts like Carla Thomas, Booker T & The MGs, The Mar-Keys, Eddie Floyd and Otis Redding, to the acts Wexler brought from New York like Sam & Dave, the label was a powerhouse of Southern soul music, music that makes the Detroit sound of Motown seem positively anemic in comparison. Later, after Wexler had raped the label, the great Isaac Hayes would come to the fore, having spent years writing for Sam & Dave and other acts. The Staple Singers, The Bar-Kays, and Johnnie Taylor added more star power to the company in the seventies, even as racial divisions had seeped into the process and destroyed the Eden that had been at the heart of the original experiment. Rob Bowman’s book, Soulsville U.S.A. is the definitive work on the label, and in conjunction with his extensive liner notes in the Stax singles box sets, fans have everything they could want in a complete history of the iconic record company. And in that respect it is curious what Robert Gordon though he could add by attempting a new history. His book is also much more informal, using (sigh) exclamation points on seemingly every page. If making a choice, there is no choice. Bowman’s is the superior book by far, while Gordon’s is a secondary text important only for the wider context it provides. While the glory days are gone Stax’ new owner, Concord, is still releasing new records by the label, but fortunately the greatness of the original company has attained the public recognition it deserves thanks to books like these.