The week leading up to the 50th Anniversary of Stax celebration at The Orpheum Theater was packed with events. The night before the concert hosted by Randy Jackson and featuring talents such as Mavis Staples, Booker T & The MGs, Chuck D, Eddie Floyd, Angie Stone, and many others, a reception was held at The Stax Museum of American Soul Music to welcome many representatives of the Concord Music Group who were in town to see the 50th anniversary show.

The Stax Museum doesn't actually allow photographs to be taken inside, but rebel that I am, I managed to snag a few.

From left: John Fry, Robert Jackson, Isaac Hayes

From left: John Hampton, Jody Stephens

From left: Randy Jackson, Rey Flemings

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On the day of the Stax anniversary show The University of Memphis’ College of Communication and Fine Arts saluted three great talents in soul music with this year’s Distinguished Achievement Award in the Creative and Performing Arts. The award went to the MGs of Booker T. & the MGs fame – Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and the late Al Jackson – at a luncheon held at Charles Vergos Rendezvous in Downtown Memphis.

From left: John Fry, Duck Dunne

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If you missed the concert at The Orpheum, you can check out some clips from the show here.

If you missed Bob Mehr's, of The Commercial Apeal, recent story on Stax, take a gander after the jump...

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via Concorde Music Group

NEW YORK, N.Y. -- In 1957, a square, white bank teller who knew nothing about African- American music launched a record label with only a tape recorder in a barn on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee. Over the next two decades, the racially-integrated Stax studio – which had moved to a theater in South Memphis by 1960 – would produce a string of hits that defined the “Memphis Sound”: “Soul Man,” “, (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” “, Green Onions,” “, Midnight Hour,” “, I’ll Take You There,” “, Respect Yourself,” “, Theme from Shaft,”‘Shaft’, and many more.

“We were so busy working and having fun that we didn’t realize the impact that we were creating at the time,” says Stax superstar Isaac Hayes. Stax Records would become one of the largest and most successful black-owned companies in the nation and a virtual soundtrack to the Civil Rights movement before succumbing in 1975 to financial and legal battles.

Now, Stax is back for a 50th anniversary re-launch, and GREAT PERFORMANCES will “take you there” with Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, premiering Wednesday, August 1 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). The film will detail the story behind the legendary label that launched a who’s-who of soul music greats: Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, the Staple Singers, Isaac Hayes, Eddie Floyd, Carla and Rufus Thomas, Albert King, and Booker T. and the MGs, to name a just a few.

Respect Yourself rejoins reunites producer-directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, whose American MastersAMERICAN MASTERS documentary Muddy Waters: Can’t Be Satisfied was a Grammy nominee. Gordon, the foremost authority on Memphis music, wrote The Road to Memphis (an episode of Martin Scorsese Presents The the Blues) and five books including It Came From Memphis (Simon & Schuster). Neville is a leading music documentary filmmaker whose works include the Emmy-winning American MastersAMERICAN MASTERS Hank Williams: Honky-Tonk Blues as well as the authoritative films about Sam Phillips, The Brill Building, and Lieber & Stoller.

Working closely with the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, the filmmakers gained access to an unprecedented wealth of source materials, including never-before-seen home movies by Stax artists; outtakes of footage from the legendary 1972 WattStax concert; and lost performances by Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs, Isaac Hayes, and others. All the key players are interviewed in the film: Isaac Hayes, Mavis Staples, Carla Thomas, Sam Moore, Booker T. Jones, members of the MGs, Eddie Floyd, and Jesse Jackson, – who, along with Richard Pryor, recorded spoken-word albums for Stax.

In addition, Respect Yourself features the first interview given by Stax founder and co-owner Jim Stewart in 15 years. Other Stax movers-and-shakers also weigh in, from co-owner Al Bell and songwriter David Porter to avowed Stax fans Elvis Costello and Bono.

This GREAT PERFORMANCES program coincides with the label’s celebrates the re-launch in December 2006, of the Stax label. To mark this milestone comeback and the label’s 50th anniversary, special Stax Revue concerts are being mounted across the country, and Concord Records, which acquired the label, has been issuing new albums and re-releasing classics from the original catalogue.

GREAT PERFORMANCES Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story was produced by Tremolo Productions, Concord Music Group and Thirteen/WNET New York. Bill O’Donnell is director of program development for GREAT PERFORMANCES. John Walker is senior producer for music; David Horn is executive producer of the broadcast.

GREAT PERFORMANCES is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, public television viewers, and PBS. Major corporate funding is provided by UBS, a global leader in wealth management, investment banking and asset management. You & Us. UBS. Additional funding for Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story is provided by The Irene Diamond Fund and the LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust.

via Digital Producer

DMN Newswire--2007-7-9--Blues-rock celebrity George Thorogood and and his band The Destroyers have returned to Ardent Studios in Memphis to record new material and to re-cut classic tracks for an upcoming EMI “Best Of” album. Included in the new collection is the enduring worldwide hit “Bad To The Bone,” which was featured in Stephen King’s Christine and also Terminator 2: Judgement Day, among numerous other films and TV show.

Jim Gaines is producer on the sessions, with Sean Burman engineering and Jason Gillespie assisting. Thorogood and his band recently performed in Memphis at The Beale Street Music Festival while in town recording at Ardent, where the new album is being mixed by John Hampton.

Via Performing Songwriter

The Scruffs
Pop Manifesto
Featured Download: “There's A Girl I Know” MP3

Scruffs leader Stephen Burns has bounced around the globe. From his band’s 1977 inception in Memphis, Burns and the Scruffs have hung their hats in New York City and Glasgow, Scotland, before settling in their current homebase of Portland, Ore.

The music on latest release Pop Manifesto shows influences from all these diverse musical locales, as well. The hipness factor is high (thank you, NYC), but the intoxicating blend of strong, Celtic-flavored melodies, smart-yet-sensitive lyrics and good old rock ’n’ roll is what sets the band apart.

The album moves from the refreshingly simple plea for peace in “Don’t You Go There” to the ’80s-influenced “There’s a Girl I Know” to the Brit-pop sound of “September’s Lost,” but the well-crafted songs and tight arrangements keep Pop Manifesto in our CD player.

Interview with Stephen Burns of the Scruffs

More info: http://thescruffs.com

Letters to The Editor from http://www.post-gazette.com/

Thursday, July 05, 2007
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

What about Stax?

I enjoyed Sharon Eberson's article about Memphis ("Memphis grooves to its own soundtrack", June 24). Since your article focused on music and the place of the city in the civil rights movement, I think you should have included some mention of Stax Records and the American Museum of Soul Music. The label brought national attention to the mostly African-American artists recording for Stax -- note this quote from former Stax employee, Homer Banks: "Black people were really proud of Stax because Memphis had a heartbeat when Stax was happening. Black people saw something visual that was a real success right in their community. I don't know that most of the white people in Memphis really knew what they had, and if they did, they really didn't care."

Your unintentional omission of Stax in your article reflects this lack of awareness of the significance of the label. Note also that the concert film, "Wattstax" filmed in Los Angeles is considered by many to be one of the finest music/social commentary films. As Jesse Jackson (obviously an important figure in the civil rights movement) stated, "Stax was not just a record company. It was a sound. It was a piece of culture. It was a moment of conscience and experience of mankind. At the right time, it meant a lot to us."

I hope if you ever write about Memphis again, you travel to Stax and include your experience in your article.

David Birch
Carterville, IL

Music and civil rights

Sharon Eberson's account of her and her friend's celebration of their 50th birthdays with a visit to Memphis regrettably missed a stop at this city's musical diamond in the rough, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Coincidentally Stax Records just celebrated its 50th birthday, tracing its infancy back to 1957. Jim Stewart, a white fiddler, and his sister, Estelle Axton, founded this record company, which came to be the lesser known (to some) southern R&B and soul rival label to the North's Motown in Detroit during the '60s and '70s. Stax's roster of artists was quite impressive and influential: Otis Redding; Sam & Dave ; Booker T. & the MGs (Stax's house band, along with the horns of the Mar-Keys); Johnny Taylor; Eddie Floyd; Issac Hayes; Carla Thomas; Rufus Thomas and many, many more. Wilson Pickett recorded his soul classic, "In the Midnight Hour," at the Stax Studio.

Perhaps more impressive is the fact that Stax was one of the first truly integrated studios, employing black and white musicians, songwriters and executives at a time that preceded the thrust of the civil rights movement in this country.

As R&B expert Peter Guralnick said, Stax truly was "the little label that could." No doubt Ms. Eberson's trip would have been greatly enhanced had it included the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

Raymond Hluska
Observatory Hill

via LA City Beat

The legendary Memphis label will celebrate 50 years of soul at the Bowl

~ By DON WALLER ~

The “50 Years of Stax” concert – set for this Wednesday, July 18, at the Hollywood Bowl – should be the most soulful local summer soiree since the storied record label promoted the semi-legendary “Wattstax” festival that reportedly drew 100,000 people to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum back in 1972. That event – a sort of black Woodstock with all the performers drawn from a single record label – was immortalized on film, and eventually issued on DVD (and reviewed in L.A. CityBeat on September 9, 2004).

For openers, we’ve got a band led by organist Booker T., who fronted the hit-making MG’s (“Green Onions,” et al.), the outfit that provided backing tracks for most of the Stax acts – represented this evening by singer-songwriters Eddie Floyd (“Knock on Wood” and “Raise Your Hand”) and William Bell (“You Don’t Miss Your Water” and the Judy Clay duet “Private Number”) as well as cult heroine Dr. Mabel John (“Your Good Thing Is About to End”) – back in the day.

Aside from these face cards, the real ace-in-the-hole is headliner Isaac Hayes, who in partnership with David Porter wrote two fistfuls of Sam & Dave hits before embarking on a solo career that’s stretched from the groundbreaking Hot Buttered Soul LP, to the Academy Award-winning Shaft film soundtrack, to a variety of film and TV roles: Truck Turner, Escape From New York, the voice of the late, lamented “Chef” on South Park.

As for the evening’s “special guests,” we’ll get veteran soul chanteuses Angie Stone and Lalah Hathaway (daughter of deceased soul star Donnie Hathaway), both newly signed – along with Soulive and Leon Ware – to the recently revived Stax label.

This particular Bowl show is part of a year-long celebration, spurred by the 2005 acquisition of the Stax name and (partial) catalog by the Concord Music Group (now owned by TV impresario Norman Lear).

As such, it not only follows in the footsteps of a little fete held at Austin’s South by Southwest music festival and an even bigger blowout that took place in Stax’s home base of Memphis (the latter lensed for an imminent DVD release) earlier this year, but also precedes a two-hour PBS special (Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story) that’s scheduled to air as part of the network’s Great Performances series on August 1.

Produced and directed by music journalist/author Robert Gordon and documentarian Morgan Neville, Respect Yourself balances fresh interviews with the label’s stars and behind-the-scenes players with a wealth of vintage performance clips and home movies to tell the rather improbable tale of the racially integrated record label from a virtually segregated Southern city. As such, Stax was responsible for literally hundreds of chartbusting records: Otis Redding’s “Respect” and “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” and “Hold On! I’m a Comin’,” Rufus Thomas’s “Walking the Dog,” daughter Carla Thomas’s “B-A-B-Y,” Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” and Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign,” for starters.

Along with the more polished efforts of Detroit’s black-owned Motown conglomerate – and the one-man operation that was James Brown – it was Memphis-based Stax and its subsidiary/distributed labels (Volt, Enterprise, Koko, Ardent, etc.) that provided the soundtrack to the African-American experience for the better part of a decade. Tickle the ivories, Professor Longhair, I feel a historical digression comin’ on …

Yes, Virginia, Stax started in 1957 when banker-by-day/country-fiddler-by-night Jim Stewart decided to form a record label called Satellite Records. Nothing much happened until he enlisted his ex-schoolteacher sister, Estelle Axton, and they set up shop in a converted movie theater located at 926 E. McLemore in South Memphis.

The neighborhood’s racial demographics were changing, and the combination of a recording studio and retail record store attracted a mixture of local black talent and R&B-besotted white boys, the latter of whom brought the label its first real hit (the 1961 instrumental “Last Night,” credited to the Mar-Keys) and cemented a distribution deal with New York-based Atlantic Records. (The previous existence of a Satellite Records prompted a name change to Stax – derived from the first two letters in the principals’ surnames – and hits from Rufus and Carla Thomas, William Bell, Booker T. & the MG’s, and Otis Redding soon followed.)

When Atlantic-signed artists Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave began rocketing up the pop charts with tracks waxed at Stax, an entire “Southern soul” style was born. A 1967 European tour by the “Stax-Volt Revue” (Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas, Arthur Conley, Booker T. & the MG’s, and the Mar-Keys) turned this into an international phenomenon. And Otis Redding’s Mar-Keys/MG’s-backed performance at the ’67 Monterey Pop Festival brought this sock-it-to-ya sound to the nascent “underground” audience.

Unfortunately, Redding would be killed in a ’67 plane crash, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King would be assassinated in Memphis a year later, and then – when it came time to renew the Atlantic distribution deal – Stax discovered it didn’t own the master recordings rights to its substantial string of hits.

With black promotion executive Al Bell taking Axton’s stake in the company, Stax soldiered on with smashes from Johnnie Taylor (“Who’s Making Love”), the Dramatics (“What You See Is What You Get”), Rufus Thomas (“Do the Funky Chicken”), the Staple Singers (“I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself”), Luther Ingram (“If Loving You Is Wrong”), and Isaac Hayes’s abovementioned album-length monsters.

Note: All Atlantic-era Stax discs feature the famous blue, stack of wax logo; all subsequent Stax records sport the equally legendary, yellow, finger-snapping logo.

Beyond picking up hits from Mel & Tim (“Starting All Over Again”), Jean Knight (“Mr. Big Stuff”), and Frederick Knight (“I’ve Been Lonely Too Long”), Stax expanded into films: the Booker T. & the MG’s soundtrack for Up Tight! (a woefully underrated ’68 black remake of The Informer, helmed by Jules Dassin) and the aforementioned Wattstax concert film – greatly enlivened by candid interviews with various Watts residents and face-breaking comic monologues from Richard Pryor, who recorded That Nigger’s Crazy for Stax’s spoken-word subsidiary label, Partee (labelmates included Moms Mabley and Jesse Jackson).

However, an unholy trinity of questionable investments, problems with its distributor and banker, and FBI and IRS investigations forced Stax into bankruptcy in 1975. Two years later, Fantasy Records snatched up the Stax post-Atlantic catalog for $1.3 million and proceeded to make a wide buttload of cashish reissuing much of this material on CD and collecting monies derived from hip-hop’s extensive use of Stax samples, such as the transmogrification of Linda Lyndell’s “What a Man” into Salt-N-Pepa with En Vogue’s “Whatta Man” (1994).

Meanwhile, the old Memphis neighborhood deteriorated and the Stax headquarters was razed, before the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (and an adjacent music academy) rose phoenix-like from its ashes in 2003. Another recent Concord Music Group reissue, the two-CD Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration, distills this history lesson into 50 songs’ worth of aural highlights.

Admittedly – with the exception of the forthcoming Hollywood Bowl concert and the PBS special – this rambling history is pretty much old news to dyed-in-the-sharkskin soul aficionados, but there’s also one disc of particularly local interest that’s recently been rescued from the Stax vaults: Johnnie Taylor’s Live at the Summit Club.

Recorded at the titular Los Angeles nitespot on September 23, 1972 – so that a Taylor performance could be included in the Wattstax film – it’s a warts ’n’ all, hourlong document of the former gospel singer-turned-“soul philosopher,” wailing his way through frenetic versions of a half-dozen of his then-recent hits and straight-up, no-chaser blues before a hardcore ghetto audience of fur-coated players ’n’ their pals. His monologues, mostly centering on infidelity, are drowning in dry humor, and the cumulative effect is bound to leave even the most casual listener swimming in sweat.

While it’s not likely that an outdoor event at the, ahem, rather more upscale Bowl will approach the olfactory sensation of this sort of wake-up-and-smell-the-Naugahyde scene, it should still be smokin’. Pass the fried chicken and potato salad.

via The Hub

Angie Stone was surrounded by music greatness.

Behind her - in photo form - were some of the greats of music. There were giant images of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers.

And in front of her? The real Isaac Hayes was there, plus many others who have shown great soul and some (members of the Television Critics Association) who may be relatively soulless. It was a sign of good news: Stax Records is back, both in old memories and in new songs.

This was the second day of the PBS portion, launching the three-week TCA tour. Certainly, we don't expect it all to dazzle. Only at PBS would we hear someone discuss "the alarming disappearance of honey bees."

But at its best, PBS can stir. We heard Carol Burnett discuss her memories of laughter. We heard Quentin Aanenson (86 and a centerpiece of Ken Burns' stunning "The War") discuss his memories of World War II deaths. We heard of an impressive project that will put all six Jane Austen works onscreen beginning in January.

And we heard the memories behind "Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story." The film, airing Aug. 1, tells of the record label that rose in Memphis, merging blacks (mostly) and whites (occasionally) to make music that was great (often).

In a hotel room that morning, we met Hayes. We were expecting Shaft; we found a gentle-voiced man, searching for words as he described the grandmother who raised him and lived to age 105.

And at night, we heard how the Stax label is being revived, both with re-releases and new records.

Stone is working on a Stax album that will come out in September. She was singing here in the toughest of situations, dealing with a bunch of TV critics. When she did call-and-response tunes, we had no idea we were supposed to respond. When she asked us to clap, she was bringing in one of life's worst rhythm sections.

Then she leaned into a Stax classic, Shirley Brown's "Woman to Woman," and soared. A moment later, she sang a new song she's written.

Stone meant the song about her own life, but it also relates to the troubles at Stax and the tragedies of the war: "That's why God gave us memories/To lead us to our victories." Right now, PBS seems to be gathering some vital memories.

Seeds planted in Delta blues
By MICHAEL SCHUMAN
Special to the Journal Sentinel

Memphis, Tenn. - The evidence is clear. Rock 'n' roll was born here, blossoming in the river city after taking root in seeds planted in the Mississippi Delta.

Any doubters should pay a visit to the Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum, open in its present location since 2004 just a block from and within earshot of the bluesy horns of famous Beale Street. The museum, created in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, tells the story of the most important musical art form of the last half of the 20th century and completes any music-lover's trip to Memphis.

Black and white sharecroppers in the 1920s and '30s may not have realized it at the time, but they were raising more than cotton. Life-sized dioramas of two sharecroppers weighing a bale of cotton symbolize one of the few times during the Jim Crow era in the South when laws and traditions of segregation were ignored.

In the museum's audio tour guide, rockabilly singer Billy Lee Riley remembers, "On weekends, the sharecroppers - the black sharecroppers AND the white sharecroppers - would sort of mingle . . . A lot of the older guys would be sitting on the porch playing guitar, singing the blues. And blowing harp."

The guitar- and cotton-picking sharecroppers wrote songs about their ways of life, and several can be heard on the audio guides as you stand by five jukeboxes representing different periods of rock and soul history. By the first jukebox, dating from 1934, one can hear titles such as "Mule Boogie," by Jim Boyd and "Mississippi Bol Weevil Blues" by Charlie Patton.

At times the same songs were rendered by both white and black musicians in distinct white and black styles.

Southern migration

By the late 1940s many former sharecroppers had moved to cities; tractors and picking machines had made a lot of sharecroppers' jobs obsolete. Between 1935 and 1960 more than 7 million Southerners left rural life behind for urban opportunities. In the Delta region, those opportunities often were in Memphis.

One refugee was Vernon Presley who relocated with his wife and son from Tupelo, Mississippi, to Memphis in 1948. His son Elvis became the most prominent musician to blend hillbilly music and blues while recording at Memphis's Sun Studio.

Listen to two versions of the classic "Blue Moon of Kentucky," one by bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, and the other by Presley. Rock pioneer Carl Perkins says on the audio guide, "I always figure that rockabilly music was a white man's lyric to a black man's rhythm . . . cause that's what Blue Moon of Kentucky was. And that was the first rockabilly record out of Memphis."

The museum credits Elvis Presley as a pacesetter, but also touches upon a controversy yet to be settled. Did Elvis steal black music, or did he merely bring it to broader audiences, thereby allowing black musicians to profit with more song royalties and bookings?

Sun and Stax Studios

The marriage of hillbilly and blues music gave birth to more than Elvis. A recreation of the Sun Studio control room is here, with the original control board intact. The engineer, usually Sun owner Sam Phillips, would often sit in the control room chair, monitoring one of a myriad of recording artists.

Phillips's motto was "We Record Anything - Anything - Anywhere - Anytime." He meant that literally, and Sun was one of the few recording studios in 1950s Memphis to record black artists such as B.B. King, Ike Turner and Howlin' Wolf and white artists like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. It was blues, rhythm and blues, hillbilly and rockabilly, the ingredients of a new art form called rock 'n' roll.

Phillips laughs, "And believe me, I have to say . . .