PBS Special Showcases Stax 1967 European Tour
Stax Records has undoubtedly sealed its place in American music history with a sound as mighty as its influence that continues to reverberate throughout the music industry.
You need only look to artists like Gerald Albright and his Grammy-nominated album Sax For Stax to recognize the decades of transcendent history that began with Stax Records.
Now a piece of Stax history can be experienced firsthand, with the airing of “Sweet Soul Music: Stax Live in Europe 1967,” which will play nationwide on PBS in March. The distinct and undeniably aged black-and-white concert footage offers a chance to see the soul men of Stax at their youthful peak.
As Jon Pareles wrote for the New York Times, “Stax Records did not choose timid singers. The tour lineup was all belters — Redding, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd and Arthur Conley — who bounced percussive phrases off the band’s unswerving beat. They were R&B troupers from an era when performers didn’t need to lip-sync when they danced. The Stax singers commanded the stage with moves no choreographer taught them, and they didn’t rest until their audience became an ecstatic congregation.”
It began 700 miles south of Motown, in those formative years of soul, where another musical dynasty was taking shape. Audacious, hardworking, dapper musicians with influences rooted deeply in gospel and blues, the brash Southerners at Stax Records that forged Memphis soul were song-and-dance men who knew how to bring an audience to its feet.
Stars like Otis Redding oozed sensuality while the band that backed them, Booker T. and the MG’s, plus the horns of the Mar-Keys, was racially integrated and musically unstoppable.
To read the entire New York Times article you can follow this link, nytimes.com. The PBS special is a shorter version of a DVD, “Stax/Volt Revue: Live in Norway 1967,” which is available from the Stax Museum in Memphis. For more information you can visit their website, staxmuseum.org.