EGN NEWS DESK
Multipart music documentaries come at us today with the insistence and abundance of the previous Okay-tel collections, scrambling to fulfill the cravings of each number of pop nostalgist. Recent months have added “James Brown: Say It Loud” (A&E), “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” (MGM+), “Kings From Queens: The Run DMC Story” (Peacock) and “Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story” (Hulu), amongst others, to the rotation.
That’s 4 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame acts proper there. But in case you are in search of one thing even larger — the arc of America throughout the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, set to a tough and infectious soundtrack — I do know a spot: “Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A.,” premiering Monday on HBO.
The stormy, comparatively brief historical past of Stax Records (it went from founding to chapter in 18 years) is wealthy materials, formed by a serendipitous mix of character, geography and studio acoustics and propelled by the regional dynamics of race, class and music in Memphis, away from the record-industry facilities of New York and Los Angeles.
The director Jamila Wignot, who has profiled Alvin Ailey for “American Masters” and directed episodes of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Finding Your Roots,” brings extra organizational sense than imaginative aptitude to the four-episode collection. “Soulsville, U.S.A.” provides a standard talking-heads remedy to a narrative that calls out for extra. But that story, monitoring from innocence to cynicism and triumph to calamity, is so involving that Wignot’s simple method isn’t deadly.
And the interviewees doing the speaking are a notably diverse and fascinating group. They embrace the white farm boy Jim Stewart, earnest, folksy and disastrously naïve, who based the label along with his sister Estelle Axton; the charismatic Black businessman Al Bell, who got here on as promotions director and saved the corporate when it appeared doomed, solely to preside over its eventual demise; and Booker T. Jones, chief of the home band Booker T. and the M.G.’s, who looms over the early episodes like a cool, cryptic, scholarly guru of soul.
The story of Stax begins with Stewart and Axton’s willingness, born of each openness and necessity, to work with the musicians who occurred to be round, a lot of whom have been Black and untested. (Jones relates the well-known anecdote of how he was pulled out of his highschool algebra class for his first Stax session.) Stewart rapidly deserted nation music and embraced the pressing, deeply felt rhythm and blues and Southern soul that performers like Carla and Rufus Thomas, Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding offered, backed by Booker T. and the M.G.’s and shepherded by songwriter-producers like Isaac Hayes and David Porter.
The early Stax hits, as the corporate’s fortunes steadily rose by the mid-60s, movement by the primary two hours of “Soulsville U.S.A.,” they usually carry you alongside on a continuous, grinning excessive. The electrifying stay performances embrace Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’” through the European tour that licensed the label’s ascendance and Redding’s epochal “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” on the Monterey Pop competition. (The collection makes use of a good bit of footage from D.A. Pennebaker’s “Monterey Pop” documentary and the 1973 live performance movie “Wattstax,” however the performances are riveting irrespective of what number of instances you’ve seen them.)
“Soulsville, U.S.A.” divides neatly into two halves, the primary culminating within the catastrophes that nearly took Stax down the primary time round: Redding’s loss of life in a aircraft crash in 1967 adopted by Atlantic Records’ appropriation of almost the complete Stax catalog in 1968, the results of a contract Stewart had signed however not learn. The second half turns into extra about enterprise and tradition and fewer about music, as Bell revives the corporate and rides the Black energy motion to a brand new degree of nationwide prominence (with Hayes’s Oscar-winning “Theme From ‘Shaft’” and the Wattstax live performance) however runs afoul of one other major-label companion, CBS Records, and might’t cease a fast slide into chapter 11.
In the final two installments Jones, who left the label in 1970, fades out and the first voices are these of Bell and the previous Stax publicity director Deanie Parker. The story they inform is that the upstart firm was killed off by a racist report {industry} and a racist Memphis enterprise institution particularly as a result of it was Black-led and, ultimately, Black-owned. It’s simple sufficient to imagine, however the lack of much less partial, extra analytical voices is noticeable and unlucky. (Some context is offered by the music author Rob Bowman, whose guide “Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records” is credited as a major supply for the documentary.)
It has been almost half a century since Stax existed as something greater than a reputation on a reissue label, a destiny poignantly conveyed by the onscreen message, following the HBO emblem, “In affiliation with Polygram Entertainment, Concord Originals, Warner Music Entertainment” — the businesses that personal the Stax songs on the soundtrack. As Al Bell says, “The massive fish eat the little fish.” But the songs can nonetheless take you there.
