WATCH A WEEKEND AT STAX VIDEO NOW!!!

Stax artists gather at the Stax Museum for a press reunion! Photo by Andrea Zucker.

A WEEKEND AT STAX NOW ON VIDEO!

Click here to see a Weekend at Stax by Dragonfly.com.

Including:

Staxtacular 07 Presented by SunTrust
Press Event on the 50th Anniversary of Stax Records
Interviews with Isaac Hayes, David Porter, Eddie Floyd, Al Bell, Mable John, and numerous others!

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Read more about the event:

The celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Stax Records is alive and well at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music here in Memphis at the original site of Stax Records.

During the weekend of February 23-26, the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau and its UK consultants Lofthouse Enterprises arranged a trip for 20 European print and radio documentary journalists to Memphis and I think they now all consider Memphis their second home.

The European journalists represented newspapers and radio stations representing roughly 15 million readers and listeners in England, Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. They attended the Stax Museum’s annual Staxtacular 07 Presented by SunTrust fund-raising event for the Stax Music Academy, where they mingled with guests such as Isaac Hayes and David Porter, along with many of the Memphis Grizzlies’ NBA players, some of whom hosted the party. They were treated to great cuisine, cocktails, a live and silent auction, and live music by hosted by The Memphis Soul Survivors with Miss Nikki, the house band from Memphis’ greatest juke joint, Wild Bill’s.

The following day, they attended the Stax Museum’s first Stax 50 “Conversations With” panel discussion Q&A session. The topic was “Behind the Scenes at Stax Records” and the panelists were Stax songwriters/performers/engineers Sir Mack Rice, Bettye Crutcher, and Larry Nix, along with Ardent Records owner John Fry, who produced dozens of Stax albums when Ardent was Stax’ sister studio.

A highlight for the journalists was a luncheon the next day with the students of The Soulsville Charter School adjacent to the Stax Museum in the Stax Music Academy. They intermingled with all of the students and ate pizza with them, with the kids asking them questions about the countries they were from and the journalists asking them questions about their lives and about the school. The journalists also sat in on the students’ Soulsville Symphony Orchestra rehearsal. Some of the charter school students were interviewed for a German radio program that reaches 5 million people, and the orchestra will also be on the show.

In addition to the other aforementioned events, the journalists were treated to a Monday afternoon press event with former Stax artists, writers, producers, and others including Isaac Hayes, Al Bell, David Porter, Eddie Floyd, Steve Cropper, Wayne Jackson, Larry Dodson, Sir Mack Rice, Jody Stephens, John Fry, Bettye Crutcher, Estelle Axton’s daughter Doris Fredricks, Soul Children’s Norman West and Queen Ann Hines, The Astors’ Curtis Johnson, Willie Mitchell’s son Lawrence Mitchell. It was like a Stax reunion and possibly the last time that many Stax legends will be in the same room together.

The Stax Museum has a concert series named Last Mondays in Studio A, during which we set the recreation of the famed recording studio up like an intimate nightclub, much the way Stax Records did when it recorded live albums. On the last night of the journalists’ stay in Memphis, the Last Monday concert featured Sir Mack Rice and the Bo-Keys, the Bo-Keys being the group that created the original soundtracks to the films Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan, and consisting of former Stax artists Skipp Pitts (who played the wah-wah guitar on “Shaft” and Ben Cauley of The Bar-Kays, the horn man who was the only member of the band on the plane with Otis Redding that survived when they crashed into a freezing lake in Wisconsin in December 1967. Shortly after Sir Mack and the Bo-Keys began to play, they were joined on stage in an impromptu jam session of “Knock on Wood” with Eddie Floyd, William Bell, John Gary Williams of The Mad Lads, and J. Blackfoot and Norman West of the Soul Children. As each Stax legend tried to one-up the other during their solos, the electricity in the air got stronger and stronger as the crowd screamed on its feet and pressed toward the front of the room, much like the crowds in Europe during the Stax/Volt tour there in 1967.

It’s hard to describe the feeling with which everyone was left after these three days of sharing Stax with those from across the pond, who revere the famed soul music label almost as if it is a religion. Twenty people, many of whom had never been to Memphis, are out there now getting ready to tell all of Europe about the experience, and it will be interesting to read and here their impressions of becoming, in their own way, part of the “Stax Family.”

Check back here as the stories begin to hit the stands.