It was soul, man: Stax, the other R&B label

In

Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story

, the documentary that airs on WHYY TV12 at 9 tonight, flamboyant Memphis resident Rufus Thomas - the man responsible for "The Funky Chicken" - puts the label home of Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and Isaac Hayes in its proper place in the 1960s and 1970s musical universe.

"Motown had the sweet," Thomas says in Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville's two-hour film. But Stax "had that big bass thing that would reach out and grab you. . . . Stax had the funk."

The difference between the two dominant R&B labels of their era was also denoted by their nicknames. Motown, with its choreographed dance moves and polished sound, billed itself as "Hitsville U.S.A."

So Al Bell, the charismatic African American businessman who ran Stax along with its white founder Jim Stewart (and through its early years, his sister Estelle Axton) came up with a different tag for the grittier label housed in a converted movie theater in Memphis: "Soulsville U.S.A."

Not that Stax had a shortage of hits. After Stewart, a banker and fiddle player who got into the record business to make country records, founded the label in 1959, they came quick, starting with R&B successes such as Carla Thomas' "Gee Whiz" and the Mar-Keys' instrumental "Last Night."

And over the next 15 years, they kept coming. To name a few: Booker T & the MG's' "Green Onions," Sam & Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'," Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay," Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood," Johnnie Taylor's "Who's Makin' Love," and Isaac Hayes' "Theme From Shaft."

Respect Yourself, which takes its title from an early-1970s Staples Singers hit, traces the rise and fall of a record label in a time of social transformation in America.

There's a mother lode of priceless archival footage, and Neville and Gordon (author of Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters) strike a balance between letting the performances play out onscreen and moving the story along with interview segments.

Among the talking heads: Hayes, his songwriter partner David Porter, MG's' Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper and Donald "Duck" Dunn, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Mavis Staples, who in response to criticism that she and her family were performing "devil's music" says: "The devil ain't got no music! All music is God's music."

Musical highlights include Redding doing his self-penned "Respect" with a band dressed in prison-style orange jumpsuits, and a frenzied black-and-white clip of Sam & Dave singing "You Don't Know Like I Know," plus the always rococo Hayes in the '70s Black Moses persona working out the funky "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic."

Respect Yourself smartly puts the music in context. With the half-black, half-white Booker T. & the MG's as house band and shared managerial responsibilities between Stewart and Bell, the company was a model of integration in the segregated South.

And its tragedies and triumphs reflected the times. Redding died in a 1967 plane crash, just as he was crossing over to the white mainstream. Months later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had come to Memphis to try to settle a sanitation workers strike, was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel, an interracial haven in a town where, as the documentary points out, public swimming pools were still being drained after blacks swam in them in 1971.

The deaths of Redding and King, and Stax's split with partner Atlantic Records, might have felled a lesser enterprise. But Respect does an excellent job of telling how the resourceful Bell rebuilt the company as the civil-rights era gave way to the black-power movement, and pushed Stax to great success with Hayes' mega-selling Hot Buttered Soul and the mammoth Wattstax concert in Los Angeles in 1972.

At a full two hours, the film runs a bit long, with too much time spent on the label's eventual tumble into bankruptcy. And the inclusion of professional talkers Bono, Chuck D. and Elvis Costello feels like an unnecessary add-on.

But those quibbles aside, Respect Yourself succeeds not only in making plain the achievements of one of the great American music labels, but also in animating the lives of the people who worked there, and the times they lived in. And in giving them, and the music they made, the respect that's deserved.

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