'Stax' Packs Stacks of Wax on Max

New HBO series re-visits glory days of Stax and the Memphis Sound, here w/ Otis, Sam & Dave, the Staples, and Eddie Floyd, plus today's cartoons.

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books (see link) and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre” which are still up at PBS.org. His award-winning books for Random House explored Upton Sinclair’s left-wing “End Poverty” race for governor of California in 1934 and in the same state the red-baiting that doomed Helen Gahagan Douglas in her Senate race against Richard Nixon in 1950. Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

As you may have heard, MAX has just launched a four-part series on the ups and downs of STAX Records from the early-‘60s to late-70s. With blacks and whites in the segregated city forming the house band (Booker T and the MGs), and later the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the city, race takes a central role at times, amid much early music by Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Sam & Dave, and interviews with the likes of Isaac Hayes—songwriter and producer before a solo star and role as “Chef”….Anyway, a must-watch. Here is the trailer and then a few songs from notables, plus a couple of episodes missing in the doc. Then today’s cartoons down below—with new Alito flag!

Trailer:

Sam & Dave, “Hold on I’m Comin’” in 1967. Nine years later we got Sam Moore to sing at 10th anniversary party for Crawdaddy (headliners were Springsteen and Southside).

Otis crossed over to young whites with famous rendition of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” at Monterey Pop Festival and in film of event, also 1967. Soon he would die plane crash just before release of “Dock of the Bay.”

The Staples out of gospel to the top of the charts with “I’ll Take You There.”

Last year a massive release of almost 150 demos by Stax writers, recently discovered, won a Grammy. Here’s demo for Eddie (“Knock on Wood”) Floyd’s wonderful “634-5789,” written with guitar legend Steve Cropper.

A couple tales not in the doc, here from WikiPedia.

Unlike Motown, which frequently packaged its artists on review tours, Stax only infrequently sponsored concerts to promote its acts. The first of such concerts was in the summer of 1965, in Los Angeles rather than in Memphis. While the show was a success, the Watts riots began the day afterward, and several Stax artists were trapped in Watts during the violence. Stax also sponsored a Christmas concert in Memphis for several years, the most notorious of which was held in 1968, when special guest Janis Joplin performed drunk and was booed off of the stage.

and:

A June 1965 session with Don Covay created bad feelings, which came to a head in early 1966, when Wilson Pickett returned to record new material. Although the session produced two hit songs—"634-5789" and "Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won't Do)"—Pickett's "corrosive" character caused havoc in the studio; the session musicians eventually walked out, and the breaking point came when Pickett followed them outside and offered them $100 each (US$967 in 2023 dollars^[5]) to complete the session. As a result, the furious house band bluntly told Jim Stewart not to bring "that asshole" to the studio again. Also tired of another label capitalizing on the Stax sound, Stewart phoned Wexler soon after the Pickett session and told him that he wanted to do no more Stax productions of non-Stax artists. One Atlantic artist who was thus not able to record at Stax was the newly signed Aretha Franklin. She instead was sent to Rick Hall's FAME studios in Alabama, which had a sound similar to that of Stax. Pickett's subsequent hits were also recorded elsewhere.

Cartoons of the Day