Respect Yourself

Starred review from September 9, 2013
In the late 1950s, Jim Stewart, and his sister, Estelle Axton, moved their little fledgling recording studio into the defunct Capitol Theater in Memphis, Tenn., opening their doors and establishing the record label that gave birth to gritty, funky soul music. A masterful storyteller, music historian Gordon (It Came from Memphis) artfully chronicles the rise and fall of one of America’s greatest music studios, situating the story of Stax within the cultural history of the 1960s in the South. Stewart, a fiddle player who knew he’d never make it in the music business himself, one day overheard a friend talking about producing music; he soon gave it a try, and eventually he was supervising the acclaimed producer Chips Moman in the studio as well as creating a business plan for the label; Estelle Axton set up a record shop in the lobby of the theater, selling the latest discs but also spinning music just recorded in the studio and gauging its market appeal. Gordon deftly narrates the stories of the many musicians who called Stax home, from Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, and Otis Redding to Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, and the Staples Singers, as well as the creative marketing and promotional strategies—the Stax-Volt Revue and Wattstax. By the early 1970s, bad business decisions and mangled personal relationships shuttered the doors of Stax. Today, the Stax sound permeates our lives and, in Gordon’s words, “became the soundtrack for liberation, the song of triumph, the sound of the path toward freedom.”

Starred review from October 1, 2013
A spellbinding history of one of the most prolific hit-making independent record companies in the history of American music. What made Stax Records so fascinating was its context in time and place: Memphis in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Gordon (Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, 2002, etc.), who is from the city and has written and made films about its music for two decades, is uniquely qualified to tell the studio's rather complicated story. Its beginnings as a side interest of banker and swing fiddle player Jim Stewart and his musically adventurous elder sister, Estelle Axton, were simple enough. Then, almost by accident, the open-hearted white siblings began recording songs by black neighbors of the studio's location at College and McLemore, beginning with R&B veteran Rufus Thomas ("Walking the Dog") and his daughter, Carla ("Gee Whiz"), who would continue to make hits with black and white listeners for Stax in the decades to come. In 1965, Stewart brought in African-American promotions man Al Bell to guide the company's growth. This interracial partnership, echoed by the studio's house band, Booker T. and the MGs, was unusual anywhere, let alone the segregated city where Martin Luther King would be murdered during a labor dispute between the white mayor and black sanitation workers. King's assassination, within a year of the loss by plane crash of the label's major star, Otis Redding, marked a stark line in the histories of Stax, Memphis and America, opening a period of revolutionary rhetoric and action and a coming-of-age of soul music as personified by a new kind of superstar, Isaac Hayes. In zesty prose, Gordon ably narrates this whole story, ending with the convoluted financial machinations that led to the label's stunningly rapid collapse. Deep cultural and social history enlivened by a cast of colorful characters.

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February 1, 2014

Gordon (Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters) follows up his similarly titled 2007 PBS documentary with this expansive account of the rise and fall of Memphis label Stax Records, a driving force in the development of R&B and soul music from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. His fluent prose and quotes from interviews keep the reader's attention as he combines technical accounts of recording sessions with the unfolding of historical events in the African American community of Memphis, for example, busing, elections, and workers' strikes. Major stars such as Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes gave Stax its renown, but the keys to its sound were in the production values exemplified by founders Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton (and later Al Bell) and their long-serving house bands. Photos peppered throughout are good contemporary illustrations--one wishes there were more. VERDICT Although treading much of the same ground as Rob Bowman's Soulsville, U.S.A., Gordon's title brings the story up to the present and is both less dense and more objective. For anyone interested in independent record labels and their music in mid-20th-century America.--Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH

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