“STAX: Soulsville\u00a0USA” is a four-part, four-hour\u00a0series about the legendary Memphis soul music\u00a0label’s rise and fall, and its\u00a0impact on American\u00a0culture and history.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stax was founded\u00a0in 1957 by siblings who bonded over their love of music: country fiddle player\u00a0Jim\u00a0Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, who\u00a0took out a second mortgage on her house to finance the construction of a music store and a recording studio. The music store was wide-ranging: it is\u00a0described in the first episode of the series\u00a0as sort of\u00a0an ongoing focus group with a permanent address, enabling\u00a0Stewart and Axton to learn\u00a0what kinds of music people were open to buying.\u00a0But the studio only recorded country because that’s what the founders knew best.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then the father-daughter team of Rufus and Carla Thomas entered the picture and recorded soul songs for the company.\u00a0Their second effort,\u00a0“Gee Whiz:\u00a0Look at His Eyes,” became the company’s first hit (in both rhythm &\u00a0blues and pop). It also started\u00a0their association with Atlantic Records, which gave the smaller company a $5000 advance plus promotion and distribution muscle in exchange for a five-year option on all future recordings. Satellite became Stax, a cryptic\u00a0amalgam of letters from Stewart and Wexler’s last names.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As any student of music history could tell you even if they didn’t know the details of\u00a0Stax’s relationship with Atlantic, this arrangement came back to bite the founders. Over the next eight years, Stax built up the careers of\u00a0multiple all-timers, including Booker T. & the MGs and\u00a0Otis Redding, and became a force to rival Motown. The latter was\u00a0putting out a slicker, altogether more palatable product, without the raw, passionate lead vocals and funky Southern-fried soul elements that defined the house band at Stax, as well as the company’s regular composer-arrangers (among them:\u00a0Isaac Hayes, who would make Stax a fortune and win them an Oscar with the original songs and\u00a0score for “Shaft”). But in 1968, months\u00a0after Redding’s death in a plane crash,\u00a0Atlantic sold out to Warner Bros. Atlantic’s point person with Stax, Jerry Wexler,\u00a0exercised a clause in the contract (which Stewart did not read before signing) that gave Atlantic all of\u00a0Stax’s existing catalog, save for\u00a0unreleased work,\u00a0and forced them to start over just when their power was at its peak.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stax persisted nonetheless. Hayes’ great success changed the energy of the operation and propelled them into the next decade, peaking with\u00a0the Wattstax event in Los Angeles. Unfortunately by 1975, Stax was functionally nonexistent. The company fell victim not only to Atlantic and Warner’s corporate treachery and an unfavorable distribution deal with CBS Records, but also the tendency of artists to start their own entertainment companies and become immediate successes based on talent and originality, then crater because nobody actually knew how to run a business. The closest equivalent to a responsible adult in Stax’s executive ranks was former DJ turned marketing executive Al Bell, who eventually became the company’s vice president and a co-owner.\u00a0He was so valuable that after repeated disagreements between him and Axton forced Stewart to pick a side, he stood with Bell and made his sister step down. Axton took the money from selling her shares in Stax and founded the Memphis Songwriters Association as well as\u00a0her own label, Fretone, whose biggest hit was the 1976 novelty record “Disco Duck.” Fantasy Records bought the post-Atlantic catalog in 1978 and started signing new acts and releasing new music, but retreated and became a reissues-only label for the next twenty years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It’s a great story with lots of\u00a0twists, and more colorful characters than can be comprehensively listed\u00a0here\u2014though\u00a0Bell and Booker T. Jones deserve special praise; their\u00a0thoughtful statements are\u00a0cement holding a sprawling narrative together. The series also succeeds as an atmospheric re-creation of places and eras. “STAX” is a trove of\u00a0well-known and rarely- or never-seen footage. Among the latter: kinescopes of live TV concerts, home movies by Stax intimates, and TV news images of the wreckage of Redding’s plane; film clips\u00a0and still photos that bring the 1960s Memphis\u00a0recording studio scene\u00a0to life (including repeated shots of a hand perched over a fader,\u00a0a cigarette smoldering between two fingers);\u00a0and archival\u00a0imagery of life beyond the studio (including 16mm\u00a0film of street life in ’60s Memphis, and hauntingly framed shots\u00a0of rain on streets and buildings in the hours leading to\u00a0the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination).\u00a0<\/p>\n
What you won’t get from the series\u00a0is much sense of the\u00a0creative and financial conflicts between artists or the seamy underbelly of the record industry (in every genre, not just soul\/R&B).\u00a0Given the apparent mandate of the series, that’s understandable. Film and TV documentaries about pre-existing\u00a0music\u00a0could not exist without the participation of corporate “intellectual property”\u00a0rights-holders. The three big dogs\u00a0here are\u00a0HBO, a division of Time Warner Discovery, which bought Warner Entertainment, an earlier incarnation of which\u00a0absorbed Atlantic; Polygram Entertainment, a division of Universal Music Group; and Concord Theatricals. The latter describes itself on its web site as a\u00a0music publishing and licensing company providing “comprehensive service” to storytellers who are using lots pre-existing music in their work, but the main thing to know about them is that they now own\u00a0Fantasy Records, the company that\u00a0\u00a0was built atop the graveyard of the post-1967 Stax. Which means that, for all of its sensitivity, intelligence and feeling, what you’re seeing when you watch “STAX”\u00a0is in some fundamental sense a four-hour promotional video\u00a0for intellectual property, commissioned and controlled by the rights holders\u2014and that if you want the down-and-dirty, unexpurgated history, you’re probably better off reading\u00a0music history books,\u00a0or spending the day on Wikipedia clicking key players’ names.<\/p>\n
Still, this is a thrilling and often moving production, one\u00a0that pushes the outer edge of the envelope of its innate limitations as product, and illuminates the material in a sorrowful, sensitive manner.\u00a0Directed and coproduced by\u00a0Jamila Wignot (“The African-Americans:\u00a0Many Rivers to Cross”), its scope, ambition,\u00a0and pace evoke “OJ Simpson: Made in America” (the architect of which, Ezra Edelman, is listed as an executive producer). “STAX” would work brilliantly as a companion piece to it, because of its ability to show how massive, anonymous-seeming historical forces bear down on individual lives. Every ten minutes there’s an anecdote that hits you right in the heart, like Jim Stewart and Carla Thomas’ account of having to enter a\u00a0restricted hotel through a service elevator; or Booker T. Jones talking about how, in the aftermath of King’s murder, his white colleagues never asked him how he was feeling or even mentioned the tragedy. “I started to feel, deep down, that something was amiss,” he says. “They didn’t understand my daily life as a Black person.” Jones says he came to understand that “the close personal relationship I had with them didn’t exist outside of the studio.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“STAX: Soulsville\u00a0USA” is a four-part, four-hour\u00a0series about the legendary Memphis soul music\u00a0label’s rise and fall, and its\u00a0impact on American\u00a0culture and history.\u00a0 Stax was founded\u00a0in 1957 by siblings who bonded over their love of music: country fiddle player\u00a0Jim\u00a0Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, who\u00a0took out a second mortgage on her house to finance the construction of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43,40],"class_list":["post-1164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}