HBO Stax Documentary Almost Takes You There

A moving, soul-stirring, if imperfect, celebration of some of the greatest music ever recorded...until it all fell apart.

Watching the HBO Stax documentary, Soulsville, U.S.A. this Memorial Day weekend inspired me to reach for the music, to revisit the feelings the Stax sound has given me for most of my life.

So I went straight to the shelf and pulled this behemoth down.

It’s one of my most prized audio possessions. I saved up and bought it when it hit stores in 1991. Nine CDs containing every single put out by Stax/Volt during their most legendary period, between 1959 and 1968, totaling 244 songs. As you can see, this wasn’t preciously kept on a shelf. It’s done some living. It’s done some traveling. It was taken to the club where I DJ’ed. It was played at house parties. It was pored over, analyzed, danced to, cried over, partied to, and drank with. It was the first time I heard a lot of these songs without the skips and pops on the records I grew up with, and it was the first time I heard quite a few of these at all.

I’ve been a Stax devotee and defender as long as I’ve been listening to music. When I was still in the single digits, I remember sifting through my mom and dad’s records, getting much more enjoyment out of the records adorned with the Stax label than from those stamped with Motown’s. Stax made me feel…something…I couldn’t with Motown. Maybe it was my southern roots, or my love of gospel and country that I shared with my maternal grandmother. I don’t know, but it was there from the start - and it’s still here. So much so that I watched the HBO doc with childish glee.

Directed by Jamila Wignot, Soulsville, U.S.A. is split into four parts. The first two take you through the years of the box set pictured above. Most of Stax’s legacy is built on that first decade. Otis Redding, Carla and Rufus Thomas, Sam & Dave, William Bell, Booker T. & the MGs, the Bar-Kays, the Mar-Keys…What’s that? You missed the Mar-Keys in the doc? Funny. So did I.

The Mar-Keys at various points consisted of Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Don Nix, Wayne Jackson, Terry Johnson, Gilbert Caple, Jerry Lee “Smoochy” Smith, Floyd Newman, Lewie Steinberg, and Charles “Packy” Axton. Their song, “Last Night”, produced by Chips Moman, hit number three pop and number two R&B in 1961. Recognize Packy’s last name? Yes, Estelle Axton was his mother, making Jim Stewart his uncle. Cropper and Dunn would end up as part of Booker T. & the MGs, and the others would sit in on sessions for many of Stax’s hits over the years. All of them in one form or another became the cornerstones of the Stax sound.

Additionally, Dunn was not the bassist on “Last Night”. He had to skip the session due to family obligations. Sitting in for him was Lewie Steinberg, who’d played in a band with Al Jackson, Sr. Jackson’s son, of course, would become the drummer for Booker T. & the MGs, and Steinberg was the bassist for their groundbreaking hit, “Green Onions” (and its B-side, “Behave Yourself”). However, neither the Mar-Keys, Steinberg, nor Chips Moman (as legendary a producer as Memphis has ever seen) is ever mentioned in Soulsville, U.S.A.

There’s a magnificent scene in the doc where Booker T. Jones demonstrates how he came up with the riff to “Green Onions”, and there’s footage showing the recording process of “Behave Yourself”. There’s plenty of time spent on this double-sided hit, yet Steinberg is never mentioned. He lived to the age of 82, passing away from cancer in 2016. Thankfully he was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame with the rest of the MGs in 1992 and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. He died where he lived, in Memphis.

After blowing sax in the Mar-Keys, Don Nix played on several other sessions at Stax and later wrote a modern blues classic, “Going Down”, immortalized by Freddie King.

Of course, there’s no way a documentary - even one spread out over four hour-long episodes - can fit everything in, so not including Nix may be a minor quibble on my part. But no mention of the Mar-Keys or Moman at all is quite shocking.

Also, while the music of Eddie Floyd and William Bell is briefly played, neither one is interviewed, nor are they hardly mentioned. As recently as this year, Bell is still performing and being rewarded justly for his contributions. (The Black Keys, in fact, just recorded Bell’s “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” on their new album, Ohio Players.)

Again, you can’t touch every milestone, cover every contributor, and come in under a reasonable length with a subject as rich and deep as Stax Records. Indeed, the doc does a masterful job of placing the label in the middle of a time of deep racial tensions in the South and beyond, and how its musicians and execs navigated both cultural changes and shady maneuvers of the majors from New York and L.A. Its treatment of Otis Redding’s slow rise to fame, his unrivaled talent, and his devastating, untimely death is riveting and cuts deep.

Soulsville, U.S.A. also adeptly handles the events leading up to and including the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was indeed a dark time in all of America, but Memphis, where it occurred, was especially vulnerable. (King was also assassinated at the very motel where Stax’s musicians went to unwind.) The consequences of the death of Dr. King reverberated throughout the Stax staff who, up until that point, had been living in an oasis of a “colorblind” world. Inside the studio, they were cut off from the class discrimination and racism of the still-segregated South. The assassination caused the fear and cynicism of the outside world to creep into their oasis for the first time, but it also offered an opportunity for dialogue, for the company’s white employees to reach out to its Black colleagues. However, as Booker T. Jones shares in the doc, "No one talked about Dr. King’s assassination…They didn't understand my daily life as a Black person…The close, personal relationship I had with them didn't exist outside of the studio." When the doc cuts to fellow MG Steve Cropper, he gives the impression that he still doesn’t quite understand Jones’s point of view. “They never talked about it,” he says. “If they felt the way they do now, why didn’t they say something then?” It’s a fascinating moment and a possible microcosm of our (mis)understanding of race relations in general.

Parts three and four, naturally, place former DJ and promotions man Al Bell at the center of the Stax story. Bell, hired by Stewart to inject some marketing savvy into the company, eventually became the Stax’s leader, successfully steering it through the turbulent remainder of the 1960s and the early part of the ‘70s, rebranding it as a Black-owned, community-involved company that wanted to prove to America that it could be “a big fish” in the music industry. Due to several complex circumstances, by 1975 the company closed and after years of neglect, the building which housed its offices and studios were torn down in 1989.

Complex is the key word here. The Stax story, to exercise extreme understatement, is complicated. Soulsville, U.S.A. mostly handles the business end well - including their dealings with cold, corporate entities like CBS - even though, it must be said, the last hour or so is all from Bell’s perspective.

The second half the doc peakes early, with footage from Wattstax, the concert Bell masterminded at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. It’s compelling stuff, but for those who have seen the entire Wattstax film, it begs the question that I had throughout parts three and four: Where are the Staple Singers?

One of the episodes is titled “Respect Yourself”, after one of the most powerful songs from both the Staple Singers and Stax’s catalog, released as Black Power had become one of the focuses of the company. It was a rallying cry from a group that had marched with Dr. King and had been at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Also, the entire series opens with the classic intro to “I’ll Take You There”, which is also used heavily in the marketing of the doc. Throughout the series, the Staples are shown briefly here and there, but almost as ghosts. They may seem like also-rans for those unfamiliar; a sad state for a group of such importance to the latter days of the label, the label where they saw their greatest secular success, in fact.

As with most imperfect docs (again, none is perfect), the best one can hope for is that they generate interest in their subjects and get new fans searching and digging. While you’re digging, it would be beneficial, to say the least, to check out 2007’s thorough Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story.

…and be sure to pick up the 2013 book from Robert Gordon, who also participated in the Respect Yourself doc. It goes much more in-depth than Rob Bowman’s tome, on what the Soulsville, U.S.A. doc was based.

Stax, long overshadowed by Motown, has finally been getting its due in the last few years. Case in point: they won two Grammys this year for their fantastic box set, Written in their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos (reviewed here by yours truly).

Also required reading, Booker T. Jones’s magnificent memoir:

These examples are, of course, just some of the wealth of information available on one of the greatest record labels to ever come out of the South - or America for that matter. Despite my quibbles, Soulsville, U.S.A. does what a great doc is supposed to do: it makes you feel for its subject(s), it makes you want to take action, and causes you to dig deep into its subject matter. Judging by those points, Soulsville, U.S.A. definitely takes you there.