Stax Records represented racial harmony in music

Stax wasn’t the same after the deaths of Redding and his band in a plane crash in 1967.

By BRUCE DANCIS

SACRAMENTO BEE

There was only one Otis Redding. While music fans in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s had plenty of stellar R&B singers to applaud — from Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Sam Cooke and Wilson Pickett to Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye and Mavis Staples — no one was quite like Redding.

The big man with the expressive voice and charismatic, emotional stage presence made such unforgettable music that he helped turn Stax Records, a tiny record label based in Memphis, Tenn., into a trend-setting, hit-making machine.

Redding died in an airplane crash Dec. 10, 1967, at age 26, just as he was emerging as a cross-cultural superstar. His biggest hit, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” wasn’t released until after his death.

Three new DVDs from Stax Records look back at the career and music of Redding and his label mates at Stax. They each fill in different aspects of the whole picture.

“Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story” ($19.98, not rated), which aired earlier this summer on PBS and is out this week on DVD, is a well-made studio biography by co-directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville. It tells the story of Stax Records’ rise and fall, from its creation in 1957 by two wealthy white folks from Memphis, banker Jim Stewart and his sister, Estelle Axton (the first two letters from their last names forming s-t-a-x), to its bankruptcy in 1975, brought on by overextension, over-consumption, bad business deals and other problems.

But in between, Stax became a pioneer not only in the creation of gutsy and funky soul music, often blending contemporary R&B with gospel, but as an oasis of racial harmony and integration in the heart of Jim Crow country.

As narrator Samuel L. Jackson puts it, “In Memphis in the ’60s, people who couldn’t dine together joined together to make music, soul music.”

At the center of this integration was the studio’s core musicians or house band, Booker T and the MGs, made up of two blacks — organist Booker T. Jones and drummer Al Jackson — and two whites — guitarist Steve Cropper and bass player Donald “Duck” Dunn. Similarly, the three-piece horn section, the Mar-Keys, which also played on most Stax recordings, also was integrated.

In 1962, Stax, and its subsidiary, Volt Records, found their trademark voice in Redding, a powerful young singer from Macon, Ga., who proved to also be an ideal writing partner with Cropper.

With the dynamic duo of Sam Moore and Dave Prater and solo stars Eddie Floyd and Carla Thomas joining Redding and the others in developing the distinctive Stax sound — raw, in contrast to slicker sounds coming out of Detroit’s Motown Records — and an aggressive new label executive named Al Bell promoting their music, Stax became a national and international phenomenon.

But the death of Redding and the young musicians in his new touring band, the Bar-kays, in December 1967, followed in April 1968 by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis, where the civil-rights leader was marching in support of striking sanitation workers, led to changes at Stax.

Various people interviewed for “Respect Yourself” testify that the interracial dynamics at the company were never the same afterward, though the label maintained its commitment to civil rights and black empowerment.

Parts of the story of Stax’s spectacular rise are told in two other DVDs.

Released two weeks ago, “Dreams To Remember: The Legacy of Otis Redding” ($14.98, not rated), directed by David Peck and Phillip Galloway, with new interviews conducted by Stax historian Rob Bowman (who also contributes a fine essay on Redding to the DVD), is a serviceable documentary on the singer.

But Redding is at his best in his performance of five songs on the just-released “Stax/Volt Revue Live in Norway” DVD ($14.98, not rated), based on remastered footage that had been taken during two shows in Oslo on April 7, 1967. Part of the tour that played before adoring and boisterous crowds in Great Britain, France and Sweden as well, the Oslo shows are the only ones in which extensive footage has been found and restored.

It’s all wonderful stuff — irresistible, joyous and a reminder of the staggering talent of Otis Redding and his cohorts at Stax Records. We will, of course, never know what Redding might have accomplished had he lived a full life, but at least we have this to make sure he will never be forgotten.