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Monday, May 02, 2005
MY IMAGINARY GUY
Deanie Parker & The Valadors
The Complete Stax-Volt Singles 1959-1968
[buy it]
OH, GIRL!
Unknown Man and Woman
Previously Unreleased
SLOW TRAIN (Take #1)
William Bell and Steve Cropper
Previously Unreleased
DINE-O-MITE
Sir Mack Rice
Previously Unreleased
SUGAR
Eddie Floyd (?)
Previously Unreleased
WILD ONE
Unknown Drunk Man #1
Previously Unreleased
BO DIDDLEY
Unknown Drunk Man #2
Previously Unreleased
AUDITION TAPE FRAGMENT
Two Females
Previously Unreleased
FIGHT ON
Gospel Woman
Previously Unreleased
TERRIBLE THING
Audition for Allen Jones
Previously Unreleased
WLOK: Spot
Booker T & The MGs
Previously Unreleased
WLOK: Weather
Booker T & The MGs
Previously Unreleased
WLOK: News Intro
Booker T & The MGs
Previously Unreleased
When Stax went bankrupt, in 1975, the label's catalog was sold at auction and its South Memphis studio was boarded up and abandoned. When the building was finally torn down, in 1989, the bricks ended up in Memphis flower beds, in living rooms, and in the local record stores, which sold them to tourists for ten bucks a pop.
"It was a dirty, low-down thing that happened," Deanie Parker told me when I visited the new Stax Museum of American Soul Music, which opened two years ago on top of the old studio's footprint. "All of us had to make a fast exit, and we didn't go by choice. The Southside Church of God in Christ - a Holiness church - bought the building for ten dollars. They said it would be a soup kitchen. Promised the community that no more sinful music would be made on this spot. And then, over the community's objections, they demolished it."
Parker, who started at Stax in '64, spent years trying to get the museum built. Memphis's city fathers hadn't raised a finger to preserve the original building - they suggested something closer to the beer-drenched Beale Street tourist center, a la Muddy Waters' sharecropper shack, which had already been taken off its foundation and sent on a tour of House of Blues clubs
Bricks or no bricks, what Memphis ended up with feels reasonably authentic. The first exhibit is an old African Methodist Episcopal church, imported board by board from Duncan, Mississippi (it's the church Parker's grandparents attended). The last exhibit - a fur-lined Cadillac which once belonged to Isaac Hayes. If that's ain't the story of American music....
So, with the exception of Deanie Parker's "My Imaginary Guy," the songs I'm posting are raw, unmixed selections from the Stax studio vaults: Off-the street audition tapes, radio spots, and song sketches by established Stax artists. Hope is, they'll give you an intimate glimpse of the studio's inner workings, or a sense of the kinds of music that filtered into the place.
posted by Alex
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