Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. is a goosebumps-inducing underdog story about why art matters

To misquote Rushmore’s Max Fischer: Music docs are a very tricky species. The stories about the bands, record labels, places, and scenes that matter—historically, commercially, culturally, or, rarer still, artistically—are hard to tell on screen, with some feeling slighter than they should (the early-aughts NYC doc Meet Me In The Bathroom is so much thinner than the expansive oral history it was based on), others a bit of a stretch (I couldn’t make it through the trailer for Hulu’s upcoming Camden, which appears to connect popular artists—Oasis, Dua Lipa, Amy Winehouse, Coldplay—that share nothing in common other than they hung out in the same neighborhood), others far too talking-heads-y (did we really need Justin Timberlake to tell us the drums on “Stayin’ Alive” sound awesome in The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?), and the scarce few that nail it, giving off the same kinetic energy as its subject’s music (three words: The Velvet Underground). A lot can go wrong, and the smallest misstep or oversimplification can really piss off a music fan, especially if that music happens to matter to them. As far as audiences go, it’s a tough crowd.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that director and producer Jamila Wignot’s docuseries, which premiered two weeks back on HBO, on the rise and fall—and subsequent against-all-odds rise and nail-in-the-coffin fall—of Stax Records fits firmly in the latter camp. In telling the twisty tale of the Memphis record label, an outfit that originally wanted to focus on country acts before discovering the incredible talent in the Black neighborhood in which it was headquartered, Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. documents far too many goosebumps-inducing moments to count: There’s a teenage Carla Thomas writing her first song in mere minutes (and singing sans her father, Rufus, for the first time) and laying down “Gee Whiz, Look At His Eyes”; there’s the extremely young house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s jamming and, unbeknownst to them, being recorded by label president Jim Stewart, cutting the track that became “Behave Yourself,” which forced them to come up with ubiquitous feel-gooder “Green Onions” STAT only because they needed a b-side (imagine that song as a b-side); there’s Sam & Dave playing a packed show in London, with white kids going nuts and Bobbies looking quite confused; there’s Otis Redding doing just about anything, but especially playing Monterey Pop (“we were the only people within miles who had suits,” laughs Booker T. Jones over footage of D. A. Pennebaker’s festival doc); there’s Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love,” penned by the label’s sole female staff writer, Bettye Crutcher, which became a sort of feminist “you cheat on me, I’ll cheat on you” anthem; there’s Isaac Hayes who, nervous about his first frontman TV appearance, dons sunglasses as a sort of shield, cementing an essential element of his iconically cool look.

There, to be sure, a lot. And Stax has a lot to say. Like Martin Scorsese’s opus on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, the music here is inextricable from the times in which it was made. And this docuseries weaves in some tough-to-shake footage—police brutality, dogs being set on Black people, neighborhoods ablaze, segregated restaurants and water fountains—to paint a clear-as-day portrait of racism far beyond the city limits of Memphis. (It’s the most affecting use of archival footage of racist brutality I’ve seen since last year’s HBO docuseries Murder In Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning.) But within those city limits—the specificity of this label and its place in Memphis—there are profound connections to the civil rights movement. To support the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, something label artists and employees vocally approved, Martin Luther King Jr. headed to town in 1968, greeted by Stax folks and told to stay at the Lorraine Motel, which was the record company’s “home away from home,” according to Dave Prater, the one place his interracial house band would hang outside the studio. It ended up being the very site where King himself was assassinated. One year earlier, Isaac Hayes noticed the word “soul” spray painted on boarded-up businesses to, in his words, keep rioters “from burning down their establishment,” which ended up being the impetus for the Sam & Dave’s No. 1 hit “Soul Man.” Explains Prater, “If you listen to ‘Soul Man,’ people think you’re talking about a girl, but you’re really talking about pride and dignity.”

It’s a testament to director Wignot’s sense of scope that she keeps everything—even world-changing social movements and events—focused on the label, so we see these changes from its eyes. The same can be said for how she handles the corporate shenanigans—first by Atlantic through a shady contract that gave the distributor “about 97 percent” of profits, according to Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records writer Rob Bowman, and then, after an incredible comeback, by CBS, which essentially stopped shipping Stax LPs to put the company out of business. The spotlight and point of view remain on these people, these artists, without jumping to dissections of major-label fuckery beyond Stax’s experiences.

The fourth and final part of the docuseries largely centers on Wattstax, a concert in 1972 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that drew 112,000 attendees, making it the biggest gathering of Black people outside a civil rights turnout, according to Robert Gordon’s book Respect Yourself: Stax Records And The Soul Explosion. It cost a buck per ticket, with proceeds benefitting charitable causes, and featured the likes of Isaac Hayes, Carla Thomas, Albert King, the Staples Singers, and other Stax label-mates. And its organizers demanded that it be documented by Black filmmakers and crew and have absolutely no LAPD presence. It ended up being a beautiful event—one that I, to be honest, hadn’t heard of but am excited to dig into now—celebrating, like the doc, a very specific place (in the concert’s case, the titular Watts neighborhood, home of the riots just seven years earlier). (In a haunting man-on-the-street testimony before the show, a local says there’s no difference between the neighborhood in the aftermath of that rebellion and now.) But arguably the most stirring aspect of that concert is its joy. And that’s very much a throughline of Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. The sheer amount of people smiling—either playing, or producing, or composing, or watching—is infectious. And after all of the tragedy that surrounds this label—Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, the plane crash that killed Otis Redding and four teenage members of the Bar-Kays—what shines through is that buzzy sensation you get hearing young musicians locked in during a jam session, creating the sort of magical feel-good music that made Stax’s snapping-finger logo so perfect.