Tag: Soul Explosion

Categories
Music Music Blog

Stax Online Archive Goes Live With “Deep Cuts” Project

CREDIT: Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music

Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music

Stax concert poster

If you’ve binge-watched too many movies and television series during this stay-at-home time, and have done every jigsaw puzzle in the house, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music might just have the solution for the social distancing doldrums. As of now, their massive digitized archive is online, free for perusing.

Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music

Stax trade ad

Though I personally feel that visiting the Stax Museum is an essential service, I realize that I’m in the minority, and, like most businesses these days, it’s not open to the public. But never fear, you can still crank up your Stax albums on the stereo and page through the many gems that the museum has diligently preserved.

The Grammy Museum Foundation has assisted with the new online project, known as Deep Cuts: Rare Items from the Stax Archives. The visual materials are broken down into categories of album cover art, posters and other artwork, children’s books, trade ads, the “Gettin’ It All Together” catalog from 1969, and the “Stax Fax” magazines produced by the company between 1968 and 1970.

Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music

Stax Fax newsletter

Of particular interest is the “Gettin’ It All Together” catalog, which features the 27 LPs released during Stax Records’ “Soul Explosion,” the massive sales summit at Memphis’ Rivermont Hotel in May, 1969. This was important both as a promotional stunt and as a morale-enhancing victory lap. By 1968, the entire Stax Records catalog from previous years was claimed by Atlantic Records, and the Memphis label was forced to reinvent itself with all new material. This richly illustrated program features album cover art and other information about the fresh wave of records released in the year that ensued.

Now fans can relive that pivotal moment in soul music history and more, via this generous online project. It’s just one of many ways to keep yourself occupied during these quiet days, and really, there’s no better respite from that gnawing coronavirus anxiety than the solid soul music of Stax Records. 

Stax Online Archive Goes Live With ‘Deep Cuts’ Project

Categories
Music Music Blog

Exclusive Video Premiere: Memphis Masters Series Celebrates the Bar-Kays

With so many classic albums of 1969 celebrating their half-century mark this year, it would be easy for music fans to sleep on an especially stellar LP reissued with extra care this month — and that would be a shame. The Bar-Kays’ Gotta Groove, originally released on Volt Records, a Stax subsidiary, was a watershed moment for Stax, for the group themselves, and for all things funky.

Besides helping to launch an approach to a harder-hitting funk/rock that would come to define the 1970s, the album was the result of the sheer tenacity and invention that kept Stax going. The label, having learned in late 1967 that Atlantic Records claimed ownership of the entire Stax catalog up to that point, was being reborn in a flurry of era-defining releases, celebrated by the double Soul Explosion album, which contained several hits generated by the newly restructured label in 1968.  Meanwhile, while the label lost one its greatest stars in the plane crash that claimed Otis Redding’s life, the Bar-Kays, who started out as the label’s youngest band in 1966, and enjoyed immediate success with their Soulfinger LP, lost most of their members in the same crash. But James Alexander and Ben Cauley, Jr., the only surviving Bar-Kays, forged ahead, and Gotta Groove was their shot across the bow in the name of rebirth, reinvention and survival.

This year, Craft Recordings launched a painstakingly-crafted reissue series, celebrating many of the works that marked the rebirth of Stax in the 1968-69 period. The select titles have been cut from their original analog tapes by Jeff Powell at Memphis’ Take Out Vinyl and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Memphis Record Pressing, making this a labor of love by some world-class local establishments.

JD Reager

Jeff Powell

Along with the records, Craft has created The Memphis Masters—a limited video series celebrating the reissued albums and showcasing Stax’s enduring musical legacy, as well as its influence on Memphis, TN. Created in partnership with Memphis Record Pressing and Memphis Tourism, and directed by Andrew Trent Fleming of TheFilmJerk Media, the multi-part series was shot in several locations around the city, including Sam Phillips Recording Service, Royal Studios and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

Each episode—available on YouTube—will revolve around an album or collection from a singular artist or group on Stax’s roster, starting with Melting Pot from Booker T. & the M.G.’s. Other titles covered include Home, from husband-and-wife songwriting duo Delaney & Bonnie, Who’s Making Love from Johnnie Taylor and Victim of the Joke?…An Opera from acclaimed producer and songwriter David Porter. The Staple Singers will also be honored with a deluxe, seven-LP box set, Come Go With Me: The Stax Collection, available in early 2020. The majority of the single albums were recently released on November 1st, while LPs from Porter and Taylor will be reissued on December 6th.

The Bar-Kays today

And today, The Memphis Flyer is proud to announce Episode Two in The Memphis Masters series, celebrating Gotta Groove by The Bar-Kays, It’s a rare deep dive into the making of an era-defining work, with commentary by artists young and old on its lasting influence. Watch here to see how the album was created, literally from the ashes of the tragedy that claimed the lives of so many, and amidst the turmoil surrounding the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then, get out to Record Store Day and get yourself a copy.

Exclusive Video Premiere: Memphis Masters Series Celebrates the Bar-Kays

Categories
Music Music Features

Soul Explosion: The New Stax Reissue

CREDIT: Wayne Moore, photographer; Stax Museum of American Soul Music

“I’m gonna have a hit if it’s the last thing I do!” exclaims Albert King. “Hanging around the studio for three days in a row now, I think ain’t nobody can get a hit outta here but Sam and Dave, Rufus Thomas, or Carla Thomas … I can play the blues myself! Yeah! Gonna get every disc jockey in business across the country. If he don’t dig this, he got a hole in his soul!” King is speaking over a song from half a century ago, but it sounds as urgent as this morning’s news. Such was the galvanizing spirit animating Stax studios throughout 1968 and 1969.

By then, the need for hits had become a matter of survival: Atlantic Records, which had distributed all Stax material through 1967, was enforcing the contractual fine print that made all Stax master recordings the property of Atlantic. Severing relations with the industry giant, Stax, guided by co-owner Al Bell, began cranking out new music at a furious pace.

Wayne Moore, photographer; Stax Museum of American Soul Music

Soul Explosion Summit Atendees with Covers

It was known as the “Soul Explosion,” and Craft Recordings has just re-released a two-LP set by that name that served as the capstone of this Herculean effort. Last year, the five-CD Stax ’68: A Memphis Story gathered every release from the first year of the label’s reinvention. The new double-vinyl reissue, identical in appearance to the original 1969 album, captures the time even more viscerally. Deanie Parker, former head of Stax publicity (and, more recently, president and CEO of the Soulsville Museum), recalls the time wistfully. “That was a time when people loved to read, to see pictures, to touch the album covers, singles, and labels, and have the artists autograph them.”

The vinyl reissue literally brings it all back home. As part of the label’s “Made in Memphis” campaign, the lacquers were cut by Memphis-based engineer Jeff Powell and manufactured at Memphis Record Pressing. And for Parker, the reissue transports her back to that time. “You’d hear something new and think, ‘Oh, this is fantastic! Look what these people did in the studio! Did you hear what they came up with last night?!’ Overnight, something dynamic could happen creatively, and it would modify the strategies that you had in mind earlier in the week, in terms of how we were gonna package it,” she recalls.

Package it they did, with an ever-refined sense of strategy. The Soul Explosion album assembled the biggest hits of 1968, with other diverse potential hits from that productive year. Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love,” the label’s first big post-Atlantic smash, is followed in quick succession by Booker T. & the MGs’ “Hang ‘Em High,” Eddie Floyd’s “I’ve Never Found a Girl (To Love Me Like You Do),” and other chart-toppers and rarities. The LP was assembled for maximum impact, just before the label hosted a massive summit of industry players in May of 1969. As Parker recalls, “That album was the centerpiece.”

Al Bell recalls, “We were multimedia before multimedia was even a thing! During that one weekend in Memphis, we had large projections on the walls the size of movie theater screens, and we had video interspersed with live performances by all of our top acts. The energy during that weekend was like nothing the music industry had seen before.”

Beyond appearing 50 years after the original release, the timing of the reissue was especially poignant, coming only days after the death of John Gary Williams, the star vocalist of the Mad Lads. The LP’s two numbers from that group, “So Nice” and “These Old Memories.” In more ways than one, “these old memories” will “bring new tears.”
Editor’s note: Memorial services for John Gary Williams will be Saturday, June 8th, at the Brown Missionary Baptist Church, 7200 Swinnea in Southaven, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.