Post by Jonel on Jun 13, 2003 14:30:49 GMT -5
Stax Museum a soulful salute to Memphis music machine
By DREW JUBERA
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
June 11, 2003
MEMPHIS -- There was the music that slipped out of Detroit's Motown studio during the 1960s and '70s: smooth, polished, hand-waxed R&B from groups like the Supremes and Temptations and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles -- a black sound that crossed over into a million car radios driven by a white teenagers, and that now launches a thousand high school reunions.
And then there was the variation that came barreling out of Memphis from a converted movie theater with a sloping floor and the hot-buttered name of Stax. The lettering on the southside studio's marquee summed up its place with street-level swagger: Soulsville, USA.
"The minute it crossed the Mason-Dixon line and got down here in Memphis, it was altogether different," the late Stax artist Rufus Thomas once said of the perspiring soul he recorded with a parade of other hit-making performers, including Otis Redding ("Try a Little Tenderness"), Isaac Hayes ("Theme From Shaft") the Staple Singers ("I'll Take You There") and house band Booker T. & the MGs ("Green Onions").
"It wasn't polished," Al Bell, a former Stax president, has said. "It was rough."
The studio, founded by Jim Stewart (the "st") and his sister Estelle Axton (the "ax"), producedmore than 400 hits in the pop and R&B charts' top 100 -- making it the second-best-selling soul label after Motown. But it closed in 1975, victim of personal and financial misadventures. The building was razed 14 years later.
Now it's back as the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, rebuilt and revitalized at the same address -- 926 E. McLemore Ave. It's a don't-miss stop for anyone who's ever batted out the beat on a dashboard to Sam & Dave's "Soul Man."
In a city that's already a mecca for pilgrim musicologists, the Stax Museum is a vital addition. With Graceland, the Sun Studio, the Rock 'n' Soul Museum and Beale Street, it completes as definitive a tour as can be found in one city of the heyday roots of blues, soul and rock 'n' roll.
Opened in May, the Stax Museum was for years the dream deferred of Deanie Parker, one of the label's earliest employees. (In Stax-style democracy, Parker was secretary, publicist and occasional songwriter.) She considered the studio's erasure a tragically lost legacy, and pushed for a downtown homage.
After several false starts, Parker's vision became more than she imagined: a $20 million complex on the studio's original site that includes a music academy for neighborhood kids. Beyond being a tourist draw, the complex is intended to help jump-start the frayed area's revival, modeled after the East Lake redevelopment in Atlanta.
The 2-square-mile Soulsville neighborhood is virtually a music museum on its own. Among those who grew up within walking distance of the studio were such Stax artists as songwriter David Porter, Booker T. Jones (of the MGs), Andrew Love (the Memphis Horns), William Brown (Mad Lads) and two of the original Bar-Kays.
It was also home of non-Staxers such as Maurice White (Earth, Wind & Fire) and, most notable of all, Aretha Franklin, whose birth house still stands at 406 Lucy Ave. Blocks away is the Hi Records studio, where Al Green ignited his career.
At once inspiring and informative, the 17,000-square-foot Stax Museum, with more than 2,000 artifacts, is a music lover's wonder.
The first offering is one that's grudgingly endured at most museums: the introductory film. This one is a 14-minute beauty, an artful, quick-as-lightning compilation of music licks, performance clips and them-that-done-it interviews. It traces soul's roots from gospel and country through the glory days -- and inglorious demise -- of Stax.
Many of the performances will be eye-opening firsts to all but the most dedicated soul historian: Redding and the Stax Revue performing to ecstatic crowds during a 1967 European tour ("We did a lot of damage over there," allowed singer Sam Moore of Sam & Dave), and the too-infrequently recalled 1972 WattsStax festival, which packed 100,000 fans into the Los Angeles Coliseum.
But it's the grainy archival performance of an elderly Sister Rosetta Tharpe, wailing on her electric guitar in a style that anticipated Chuck Berry, that alone is worth the admission price.
Exiting the theater -- to the summer sound of cicadas -- one next comes upon a stunningly reconstructed country church. Built in 1906, it was the African Methodist Episcopal Church that Parker attended as a child in Duncan, Miss.
The wooden structure -- rebuilt board by board to three-fourths its original size -- has no explicit historic significance, but it is representative of the churches that spawned soul. With a video of old services rolling on a screen near the pulpit, and the scent of ancient hardwood planks stirring up a kind of vernacular American trace memory, one feels for a moment in the actual presence of where it all began.
"I hope that's what people come and experience," says Parker, executive director of the Soulsville complex.
The exhibits that follow in a warren of themed rooms range from the sublime to the resplendently ridiculous -- from cultural time lines, to walls of album covers, to vintage instruments, to a dance floor visitors can step out on while TV's "Soul Train" unspools on a screen.
There's original sheet music from Stax classics, including 34 pages of Hayes' "Theme From Shaft," accompanied by the wah-wah pedal used by guitarist Charles "Skip" Pitts.
There's Hayes' gold-trimmed 1972 Cadillac El Dorado, equipped with a remote that Hayes used to turn the car on from his bedroom and warm it before he got behind the wheel. The peacock-blue land yacht rotates on a kind of giant Lazy Susan, its two doors swung open, for maximum admiration.
And then there's the Stax recording studio, re-created right down to the sloping floor, an original control panel and period Billboard magazines tossed around replica furniture -- but not, alas, re-created down to the studio's legendary overflowing ashtrays.
As Al Bell puts it in the shrine's opening documentary, "Creativity at Stax was oozing."
The Stax Museum of American Soul Music honorably captures that.
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www.ajc.com/travel/content/shared/travel/destinations/tennessee/staxmemphis061503.html
