Stax

By sheer luck, I happened to be flipping past PBS last night just as this documentary on Stax Records was starting. This was truly fortuitous, as I'm a huge Stax fan, and think their catalog contains some of the best music ever made. The program had some good interviews, and some absolutely fantastic performance footage.

The doc did a good job highlighting the significance of Stax's being racially integrated throughout the company, from the front office to the musicians, how unusual this was for America (and certainly for Memphis, TN) in the 60's, and how things were never quite the same after MLK's murder in 1968. One fact that I wasn't aware of was that Memphis's Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated, and which is now part of the National Civil Rights Museum, was a place where the Stax artists would often gather during the hot summer days, to relax around the pool and work on music together before going into the studio in the evening. King's murder was a disaster for race relations across this country, but it was all the more devastating for the Stax family that he was killed in a place that had been their oasis of racial harmony.

Here's Otis Redding bringing the soul to the hippies at the Monterey Pop Festival, in one of the great crossover performances of the pop era.