I voted Stax.
Motown had some true visionaries, including Marvin and Stevie (Before the Soft Pop that many only know him for now...), and the Soul of it's best moments has a serious Cool. Still, despite having music that moved and singers that were powerful, there was still a bit of a showbiz that crept in by the Late 60's that killed off most of it's effect for me. No dismissing how Gordy ran things, though, although the move to LA in '72 seriously turned things for the worse despite having some major highlights.
Stax had a Soul that really hit, and Booker T and the MGs were among the first to break barriers while being stars and not just a backing band while Otis Redding and Sam and Dave had an intense style. As for the Post-Atlantic days, there's plenty of classics with Issac Hayes beyond "Shaft" that make him stand out as a visionary as well as many fine tracks by The Staple Singers, Johnny Taylor, and The Bar-Kays that stand out as solid examples of Soul and Funk that move.
Sadly, however, Stax as a business was for the most part in tough waters after their fateful parting with Atlantic as a Distributor who wound up with their Pre-1968 masters. Still, even with the failures which later marked their original demise by the Mid-70's, it had some good moments while trying to broaden the range of music it presented, even if some of it went little heard in it's day due to the obvious distribution problems. With the intense feelings running in Memphis after the assassination of Dr. King and the (In retrospect, understandable) defecting of some of it's major talent at the time (Booker went to LA, for example), the Soul that it was best with only grew in boldness, and it's Wattstax festival was both a good thought-provoking event and a fine promotional powerhouse for the label (that was, of course, until trouble struck with the Distribution deal with CBS shortly after the the finalization of the deal, setting off the rest of the mess that wound up in a sad place by '75).
With it's releases of Soul, Funk, and Gospel, Stax stayed very close to it's fanbase even if times were troubled on the business side and some of the releases trying too hard to reach the market CBS was more comfortable distributing to (Just thinking of some of their albums of 74/75 can make a true fan cry...Mike Douglas? How about Lina Zavaroni? Or, get this, Morton Downey, Jr.?). Forgetting all of the side steps that never could have worked, their final days at least introduced Richard Pryor to the Comedy album market and had a few standout tracks like Shirley Brown's "Woman to Woman," among many great highlights, many that were not promoted well the first time around, but still remain easy to find in the digital age to remind how the Soul and Funk of Stax holds up very well.
Last edited by Screen13; 02-01-2010 at 04:49 PM.
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