Any of you guys ever been to the Stax museum? It's a good way to spend an afternoon if you've not. I really like that place and there's lots of cool stuff to see and hear, but one thing has always bothered me about it: the introductory video.
The video paints a really idealistic picture of what Stax records was like in its hay day, and I think it's rather simplistic. What they say is that throughout the 1960s, Stax was a place where there was no black and white, and where everybody was just a musician. The video will
Tell you that it was Stax's unique tolerance that made their hits but it's not really that simple. For example: Booker T and the MGs, the legendary Stax house band who backed the majority of the Stax catalogue, are often looked to in admiration because there were two black dudes and two white dudes. Well, they didn't really just meet up one day and start to form the best Memphis instrumental band, they originally were a group with 3 black guys and Steve Cropper. Early on in their run as a band, the original bassist was removed for Donald "Duck" Dunn. Some historians (like Dr. Hughes here at Rhodes) would argue that the interracial Booker T and the MGs didn't come about by chance: it was a marketing technique during a socially turgid time with the winds of changing gradually growing stronger and stronger.
And so the video at the museum will tell you that after King was shot in 1968, the musicians at Stax simply couldn't ignore their race anymore and it led to a decline in the music. Wellllllp thats not true either because they continued producing hits (some of their biggest came out in 1971 and 1972), and it was really bad record deals with a number of companies that saw the organization stripped of the rights to most of its collection and drew royalties further and further from the artists.
They give you a good story and it gets people in the door and feeling good, it's just not true.
Marco Pavé, a Memphis rapper and entrepreneur, had some of the same thoughts on the history of Stax in this recent interview with MTV:
ReplyDelete"On the collapse of Stax, Pavé turns, as he often does, to a logic that weaves together Memphis’s tense history with music, race, and style. “Stax was destroyed by racism. People felt a way about how William Bell and Isaac Hayes were moving through the world,” he tells me, while lightly tugging at the two thin gold chains around his neck. “They were the precursors to hip-hop. They had fancy cars, covered in gold chains. In South Memphis, a black neighborhood. That upset people in the '60s, even before MLK was assassinated. People saw how much control someone like Rufus Thomas had over a hundred thousand people in Los Angeles. When people rushed the stage and Rufus said ‘go back,’ the people went back. [Stax executive] Al Bell owed Atlantic Records money, so they cut off the royalty streams to Stax, and he couldn’t pay them back. So there you have it. They tore down the building in 1989. A church bought it for ten dollars. And then they rebuilt it as a museum in 2003. The city feels so bad about it, but instead of admitting that it was all about racism and power, they only care to talk about legacy.”
The last phrase in particular echoes your point. As a local musician trying to navigate the complicated histories of race and music in Memphis, I think Pavé is excellently positioned to speak about the legacies of Stax.