Aaron Gilbreath reviews Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, which offers insights into a groundbreaking Memphis studio:
[The book’s] absorbing scenes show the way original music gets made. Here, it’s often accidentally: musicians goofing around in the studio, tinkering with riffs they’d written or combinations of notes they find themselves drawn to. In this quiet way, Respect Yourself portrays the enigmatic workings of creativity — and the role of common, unplanned events — as with the way the chorus to Sam and Dave’s breakout hit “Hold On, I’m Comin’” resulted when Dave was sitting on the toilet, and Isaac Hayes kept telling him to hurry up and get back downstairs to the studio. The way Otis Redding came to Stax’s attention while working as a chauffeur for a visiting guitarist, and kept asking people at the session to let him sing. And how Rufus Thomas casually recorded his big hit “Walking the Dog” during a quick studio visit on the fly between church and Sunday dinner. Gordon wisely contrasts Stax’s loose “organic” approach with Motown’s assembly line, automaker approach. As Isaac Hayes put it, “Stax was down-to-earth, raw, very honest music.”
Reviewing the book in December, Elsa Dixler highlighted (NYT) what made Stax stand out from other labels:
As early as 1962, some of the qualities that made Stax unusual were apparent. The most important was the absence of racism in a Memphis that was still completely segregated. “Being treated like an equal human being . . . was really a phenomenon,” Al Bell, who later became the executive vice president of Stax, recalled. “The spirit that came from Jim and his sister Estelle Axton allowed all of us, black and white, to . . . come into the doors of Stax, where you had freedom, you had harmony, you had people working together.” An obvious symbol of that harmony was Booker T. and the MG’s, consisting of two black musicians and two white. Gordon makes clear how extraordinary this atmosphere was by following the stories of the effort to unionize Memphis’s mistreated sanitation workers and of the white flight that followed the city’s slow compliance with Brown v. Board of Education.
The Dish 