Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection

From their plane back to Memphis, the Astors could see the fires. Four days earlier, you could’ve caught the group performing their hit record “Candy” on the syndicated Los Angeles television show Shivaree. The appearance was part of a media blitz devised by Stax Records co-founder Estelle Axton and popular local DJ Nathaniel “Magnificent” Montague. In August 1965, the label dispatched a large portion of its roster to the West Coast; the Stax Revue was capped by a two-day stand at the 5/4 Ballroom in the South L.A. neighborhood of Watts.

After the Saturday show, a teenage fan named Jacqui Jacquette invited Stax star Carla Thomas to her house for dinner, then a tour of Watts. During the tour, she told Thomas about people killed by the LAPD, then brought her to a community meeting led by her cousin, Tommy Jacquette, who was teaching passive resistance as a lifesaving measure to teens. The following Wednesday, a violent LAPD traffic stop sparked a full-scale revolt; 34 people would die during the six-day Watts Uprising. Whatever cultural impact Stax hoped to make dissipated with its jet exhaust. On the ground, the people of Watts were chanting the Magnificent Montague’s catchphrase: Burn, baby, burn!

When Stax returned to Los Angeles, it wasn’t as a guest, but as a transplant. Newly independent and riding high under the leadership of label president Al Bell—plus an astonishing star turn from staff writer/producer Isaac Hayes—Stax opened a West Coast branch in 1972 and started looking to expand into motion pictures. A back-of-the-napkin pitch (“Black Woodstock”) quickly ballooned into an audacious event: Wattstax ’72, the cornerstone of the Watts Summer Festival. (The festival was intended to commemorate the uprising; Tommy Jacquette served as its executive director from 1966 until his death in 2009.) The one-day concert featured more than two dozen acts from the Stax roster, capped by a performance by Hayes. Tickets were priced at one dollar when they weren’t given away; the organizers would proudly note that the estimated 112,000 attendees represented the second-largest gathering of Black Americans in history, after the March on Washington. It was an utter triumph, and Stax commemorated it by issuing the Wattstax film and two soundtracks the following year.

Even taken all together, though, these releases told an incomplete—and at times misleading—story. Stax added crowd noise to studio cuts by the Staple Singers and Eddie Floyd, then included them on Wattstax: The Living Word as “live” singles. The film had to drop Hayes’ opening performance of “Theme From Shaft” after MGM raised a contractual point; director Mel Stuart responded by filming Hayes and band performing a new song on a Hollywood soundstage, then splicing the footage into the final edit. A slew of hitmakers including Johnnie Taylor and the Emotions were dropped from the lineup due to time constraints; the ever-industrious Stax booked them makeup dates at L.A.’s Summit Club in the fall, then seeded select performances into the second soundtrack. Over the next few decades, Stax released portions of select Wattstax and Summit sets piecemeal; in 2003, a recut Wattstax with restored Hayes performances (including “Shaft”) dropped alongside an expanded soundtrack that boasted a CD’s worth of unreleased material.

At last, we have the final word. Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection presents Wattstax ’72 in its entirety and in correct sequence: every song, every introduction, every plea to get off the grass. (The festival was held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, in the middle of the Rams’ preseason schedule, and the organizers had to obtain field insurance. Various artists and emcees cajoling people back to the stands forms a massive subplot on this recording.) Crucial sets from the Staple Singers and Isaac Hayes are now whole, and Hayes’ set-opening “Theme From Shaft” (which had to be performed twice due to a filming issue) is available for the first time, all fibrous wah and off-mic shouts of yeah!

Half a dozen Summit sets appear in their entirety, as well as a bonus disc of Wattstax-related tracks. Wattstax wasn’t strictly a concert film; in order to display the fullness of the Black American experience, its performances were interspersed with on-the-street segments featuring local actors riffing on various topics, as well as bits from future Stax signee Richard Pryor. (Pryor’s routines are present in full.) Craft Recordings and Stax have also released a box that’s just the Wattstax concert, as well as a single disc of highlights. But Soul’d Out is the real deal: a portrait of a pop label at its imperial peak, presenting its unmediated vision of Blackness for a rapt audience.

Even at a third of the length, the scope and presentation of Soul’d Out begs comparison to Rhino’s 38xCD Woodstock: Back to the Garden set. Each box goes for total immersion, preserving every stray stage announcement while restoring excised artists and performances to their proper context. Wattstax kicked off with the world premiere of Stax producer/arranger Dale Warren’s “Salvation Symphony,” a kind of fourth-stream music melding soul propulsion and classical motifs. Only an eight-minute excerpt had previously been issued; in full form, it’s the triumphant counterpart to Warren’s bleaker work with the prog-soul act 24-Carat Black. Tommy Tate’s set is a triptych of deep soul in the Dave Godin vein: wistful and melodically rich. It’s capped with “School of Life,” a teen-pregnancy power ballad that, in its tenderness and lyrical detail if not its bombast, is a cousin to Big Star’s “Thirteen” (originally released on a Stax subsidiary).

The majority of the unreleased material, though, comes from the Summit Club dates. They’re valuable enough as newly restored chapters in the Wattstax story. But as Stax historian Rob Bowman notes in a Soul’d Out essay, live nightclub R&B (official or bootlegged) from this era is all too rare, especially from second- and third-tier acts. If there are undiscovered soundboard recordings that approach the deranged energy of Chicago’s Sons of Slum—who handle Otis Redding’s “Respect” like a frat-rock band paid in amphetamines—we could use them.

Still, we can marvel at what’s here. There’s an audacious medley from pop-soul cousin act Mel & Tim of their jangly pre-Stax hit “Good Guys Only Win in the Movies” and “Ain’t No Sunshine” that uses an instrumental excerpt from Isaac Hayes’ “Walk on By” as a sort of step-down transformer. It’s even more astonishing considering that a month earlier, the duo withdrew from Wattstax at the last minute due to Tim McPherson’s acute pain revealing itself as pancreatic cancer. The Emotions were bumped from the concert itself but scored a documentary highlight with their dramatic and finely wrought rendition of the gospel standard “Peace Be Still” in a sweltering storefront church. Even so, they weren’t a gospel act, and their Summit set shows the trio flexing the same sense of pace and ecstasy on their magisterial Supremes homage from 1972, “I Could Never Be Happy.”

In the final accounting, Wattstax may have been the success that sunk Stax. Al Bell’s ability to execute his ambitions impressed Columbia enough that the label agreed to become Stax’s distributor. But Stax was producing more product—R&B, gospel, comedy, rock—than Columbia knew what to do with, and within two years, the companies’ competing priorities would bring them to war. At the same time, Stax’s elevated profile drew federal attention to its complex (yet, for the time, largely standard) financial relationships with promoters and DJs. On top of all that, its overextended lenders were crunched by the 1973 recession. By the end of 1974, Isaac Hayes and Richard Pryor had left Stax due to nonpayment. By the end of 1975, the Stax offices had closed under court order. It was an infuriating end for one of the country’s great labels.

Introducing Stax in his opening remarks, the Reverend Jesse Jackson invoked “liberation through music and lyrics.” It may have been true that Stax offered that possibility, and that this possibility was deliberately forestalled by the existing power structures. It may have been true that actual liberation was achievable not by the organization headlining the Watts Summer Festival, but by the energies of the uprising the festival commemorated. For the musicians involved, the energy of Wattstax was enough to arouse awe for the rest of their lives. On that day, anything seemed possible.

Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection

$200 at Rough Trade