Donald “Duck” Dunn, bassist for Booker T. and the MGs, RIP

[johnfoyle]

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsar ... ?nid=18888

Stax Museum concert due on CD, DVD


Shout! Factory records will release Soul Comes Home, a
sixteen-track live album recorded last April at the
Orpheum Theatre in Memphis, on February 3rd, to
commemorate the first anniversary of the opening of
the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Featured on
the set are Isaac Hayes, Percy Sledge, Solomon Burke,
Al Green, Mavis Staples and a performance of "Soul
Finger" for which Chuck D. fronts the Bar-Kays.
"When I was seven years old 'Soul Finger' was a big
record," Chuck D. says. "To be singing with an artist
I've heard and also sampled throughout the years was
very rewarding, probably one of the most rewarding
experiences I've had in my career. It was an
unbelievable re-visitation of old feelings."

Founded in the late Fifties, the Memphis-based Stax
label featured a roster that at one time brimmed with
talent such as Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs,
Rufus Thomas, and Sam and Dave, before bad business
decisions led to its shuttering in 1976. The Stax
Museum opened in downtown Memphis last winter.

A DVD of the performance will be released on the same
day and will include three songs not found on the CD,
in addition to interviews with Isaac Hayes, Chuck D,
Bono, and Elvis Costello. Also included will be
features dedicated to the new museum, Isaac Hayes,
Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs, and the Bar-Kays.

[bobster]

Now that sounds a DVD worth purchasing/renting!!!

[johnfoyle]

http://stax50.com/blog/news/stax-on-the-silver-screen/

STAX ON THE SILVER SCREEN

June 18th, 2007 by BritSoulMan

(extract)

Exciting news for those living in Los Angeles - and those planning to visit! Two days after the Stax 50th anniversary concert at The Hollywood Bowl on July 18, The American Cinematheque will present a series of films celebrating soul music - and in particular, the sound of Stax.

All screenings take place at The Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood and are as follows:

Saturday July 21, 2007 - 9:00pm:
RESPECT YOURSELF
(2007, 115 mins, Tremolo Productions, Directed by Morgan Neville)

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stax Records, this brand new documentary created for PBS is the authoritative history of the rise of the Memphis soul label that changed the world. The film is jammed with amazing archive rarities. Live performances, forgotten TV appearances, home movies, news footage, lost recordings of all the legendary Stax artists from Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes to Sam & Dave and the Staples Singers. The film is also the story of the civil rights movement and how the music created at Stax mirrored the glories and pains of that struggle. The film offers fresh insights from the survivors together with heartfelt testimony from Stax devotees ranging from Bono and Elvis Costello to Chuck D.

[johnfoyle]

http://stax50.com/blog/news/pbs-great-p ... y-rebirth/

PBS’ “Great Performancesâ€

[johnfoyle]

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnis ... 46017.html

Philadelphia Inquirer, PA

August 1 '07


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

Inquirer Music Critic


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.

Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "In the Mix," at http://go.philly.com/inthemix.

[johnfoyle]

http://www.acerecords.co.uk/content.php?page_id=1327

'Don't miss the forthcoming cinematic release of: “Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Storyâ€

[johnfoyle]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/whatson/s ... yword=stax

Respect Yourself - The Stax Story

Part of Stax Records Night. The story of Stax Records, whose hits include Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay, Soul Man and Respect. Featuring interviews with all the key players. [S]

BBC Four, Fri 25 Jul, 21:00-22:55 115mins Stereo Widescreen

[johnfoyle]

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/legendar ... at-age-70/

Donald “Duck” Dunn, who played on hundreds of rock and soul classics as the bassist for Booker T. and the MGs, and later as a session player, passed away Sunday morning at the age of 70. Steve Cropper, the MGs guitarist, broke the news on his Facebook page.

Elvis wrote about Donald in a note for a 2006 compilation -

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/inde ... nd_The_MGs

[And No Coffee Table]

Elvis wrote about Donald in a note for a 2006 compilation -

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/inde ... nd_The_MGs

Big influence on Bruce Thomas too.

I can't read music. I learned to play off records. The Beatles had too many chords to follow, so I learned to play R&B stuff. I used to put on Booker T & The M G's albums time after time and follow Duck Dunn until I got all his riffs down, and then go on to Chuck Berry or whatever. But mainly it was Booker T and Stax soul, which is pretty obvious in the way I play. It's very good training, that one, because it's so rhythmically on. You play tight first and worry about the notes later. Happily, my instinct led me in the right direction, as I learned to play the parts very punchy and rhythmically first, and then I started finding out all these little tricks about harmony notes and passing notes and melody and all that a bit later. It just built up gradually.

http://www.elviscostellofans.com/phpBB2 ... f=2&t=8127

[verbal gymnastics]

All of the intro music at Liverpool was a tribute to Duck. The stage intro of Rise Robots Rise was very short.

[watercamp]

I'm feeling older with each great musician that passes.

Thanks for music Donald.

They must be having a wild time on the other side these days.

[johnfoyle]

http://www.brucethomas.co.uk/?p=1792

Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn: 1941-2012 by Bruce Thomas