Sounds, soul of Stax explored in ‘Respect Yourself’

What’s the greatest soul music label of all time?

With all respect to Philadelphia International Records, which places a strong third, the battle royal ultimately comes down to Motown – Berry Gordy’s Detroit hit factory that achieved its goal of becoming “The Sound of Young America” – and Stax, the Memphis label that made stars out of Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Wilson Pickett and many others.

Some argue that because Motown aimed above all to produce sleek, polished pop music (sung, albeit, by supremely soulful artists), Gordy’s enterprise was principally a pop label. Valid, though debatable. That would leave us with Stax, whose sound was always grittier, funkier and brassier.

Robert Gordon’s “Respect Yourself” tells of the precipitous rise and dramatic fall of Stax, which went into bankruptcy in 1975 after a spectacular run that ended with the label’s last hit, Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman” in 1974.

The label was founded as Satellite Records in 1957 and changed its name four years later, combining the names of banker and fiddle player Jim Stewart and his big sister Estelle Axton, who mortgaged her house to pay for the company’s first tape recorder.

Stewart and Axton were white, as were guitarist Steve Cropper and bass player Donald “Duck” Dunn, one-half of Booker T & the M.G.’s, the house band that served up one of the label’s early enduring hits, with the delectably greasy instrumental “Green Onions” in 1962.

But the other half of the M.G.’s – Hammond B-3 player Booker T. Jones and sublime drummer Al Jackson Jr. – were black, as were virtually all of the other big players at Stax.

How that cooperation between the races worked – and then ceased to – in the segregated South is a unifying thread running through Gordon’s page-turner of a musical history.

But the Stax story is a tale of resiliency and ingenuity, much of it embodied in Al Bell, the innovative African-American executive. In 1969, Stewart bought Axton out and handed over the reins of the company to Bell, who turned it into a symbol of black pride.

It was Bell who engineered Stax’s impressive second act, riding hitmakers like Johnny Taylor, Hayes and the Staple Singers, whose 1971 “Respect Yourself” gives the book its title. Bell, who wrote the Staple’s “I’ll Take You There,” signed acts like Richard Pryor and masterminded Wattsstax, the 1972 Los Angeles music festival that became a feature film.

Much of the ground Gordon covers is familiar and can be found in Peter Guralnick’s broader “Sweet Soul Music” and Rob Bowman’s label history, “Soulsville U.S.A.” But “Respect Yourself” shines because the thoroughness of Gordon’s research doesn’t stop him from keeping a complicated story moving quickly, while doing evenhanded justice to the dozens of characters who brought this gloriously gritty music to the world.