In 1965, the first promotional trip was organized for Stax artists. Although record sales were good, the company felt that a wider exposure was possible through live performances. Estelle Axton, the co-owner who ran the record shop at Stax, organized that first trip to California. It consisted of radio and TV appearances, plus two evening concerts in Los Angeles at the 4-5 ballroom in Watts. The tour lasted for two weeks. Most of the major names were there: Carla and Rufus Thomas, Booker T & the MGs, the Mar-keys, Wilson Pickett, the Mad Lads, William Bell, and the Astors. The tour went well and then, on the following day, as the group were organizing their return to Memphis, riots broke out in Watts.
After six days of rioting, which caused thirty-four deaths, the National Guard managed to quell the unrest.
In 1967, a similar tour was organized for the Stax artists, this time to Europe. It was given a name inspired by a Ray Charles song: Hit the Road Stax. Again, most of the top artists were included: Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd, Arthur Conley, Booker T & the MGs and the Mar-Keys. For most of the group, it was a first. The cities of Europe presented a new experience and a chance to take their music to a whole new market. To their surprise, the music had gone before them. Eddie Floyd has spoken of his amazement at the reaction of the fans when he came on stage. They were all treated like heroes, the fans knew all the songs and all the words. The queues to get into the shows were longer than anything the artists had seen before. Added to that, they could all stay in the same hotels and eat in the same restaurants. No wonder the tour made such an impression on the performers.
The first show of the tour was at the Finsbury Park Astoria at 6.40pm on March 17th, 1967, with a repeat performance at 9.10pm. Tickets cost £1 for the best seats! Booker T & the MGs opened the show with a short set. They were then joined on stage by the Mar-Keys for three more instrumentals. The band stayed on for the rest of the performances, backing all the singers. Arthur Conley was followed by Carla Thomas and then Eddie Floyd, who closed the first half.
After the interval, Sam & Dave got the audience on their feet. They ran through all their tricks, jumping into the audience, pretending to faint, faking the end of their set and then re-emerging. All that was a warm-up for the star of the show, Otis Redding, who quietened the audience before launching into “Day Tripper”. Then came all the hits: “Shake”, “Satifaction”, “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa”, “Respect”, “My Girl” and finally “Try A Little Tenderness”. At the end, there was an explosion of noise, as the fans finally understood that they really had seen their favourite artists, live in London.
From the Astoria the tour covered another twenty-eight cities in thirty-one days, with a good number of the venues in the UK. The tour ended at the Hammersmith Odeon, and then they were gone.
Gone but not forgotten. Stax has issued a three-volume set of the Stax-Volt Revue Live In Europe. Booker T & the MGs released a live album, “Back to Back”. There is also a DVD of the show in Oslo.
The 1967 European Tour achieved one more thing. It made the Stax label widely appreciated as the source of some of the best music in the USA. In Europe, including the UK, the records had been issued on Atlantic up until March 1967. Now, the Stax name was on show.
Seven years after the Watts riots in Los Angeles, Stax decided to organise a benefit concert to commemorate the anniversary of their first tour. The concert took place at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on 20th August 1972. The staff at the Coliseum were not convinced that a small record company from Memphis could organise a successful concert in such a big venue. However, Stax president Al Bell, along with several other Stax directors, convinced them and the Wattstax concert was given the go-ahead. All the seats cost one dollar each!
The LA Rams football team had games booked at the stadium on the 19th and the 21st August, so the stage had to be constructed overnight after the first game finished. Below the stage, a long table was set up for the tape machines that would be used to record the show.
On the day of the concert, the mostly African-American audience started to arrive in the early afternoon. By 2.30pm everyone was in their seats. Around the stage and dotted around in the crowd there were members of the film crew that had been hired to film the event. At 2.38pm the opening number rang out around the stadium, an instrumental written by Dale Warren entitled “Salvation Symphony”, played by the Wattstax’72 Orchestra. There were 112,000 people listening.
The roll-call of artists is impressive, including Kim Weston, the Staple Singers, Frederick Knight, William Bell, Eddie Floyd, Rance Allen, David Porter, the Bar-Kays, Carla Thomas, Albert King, Rufus Thomas, Luther Ingram, with Isaac Hayes closing the show in the early evening.
Stax released a double album of the show, “Wattstax: The Living World”, on January 18th 1973, which was awarded gold certification by the RIAA. Various other albums relating to the concert have been issued subsequently, the last being “Wattstax: Highlights from the Soundtrack” on a CD in 2004.
Some of the Stax roster of artists were unable to be at the show, but Stax decided to film several of them performing at various venues in Los Angeles in the days following the main event. This footage was then added to that filmed at the event itself and made into the Wattstax film, which was released in 1973. The additional performances came from the Emotions, Johnnie Taylor and Little Milton. Some other interesting additions were made to the film. In between some of the songs, there are shots of the local residents of Watts getting on with their lives, going about their business, interspersed with staged interviews on a variety of topics.
The premiere of the film was held at Los Angeles Music Centre on 14th February 1973. For contractual reasons, Isaac Hayes’ performance of two songs from Shaft had to be deleted. They were replaced by a newly-filmed version of his next single “Rolling Down a Mountainside”. Fortunately, it was possible for the two missing songs, “Theme from Shaft” and “Soulsville”, to be added when the film was remastered in 2003. A DVD of the film was released by Warner Bros in 2004.
In 2020, the film was chosen to be preserved in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its historical, cultural and aesthetic significance.
Tim Sampson, communications director at the Soulsville Foundation, has summed up this significance very well:
“Stax arrived in the midst of the civil rights movement, and instead of sitting on the sidelines, it tried to instigate change.”
