In the great year of 1965, any soul fan in Memphis would surely have heard the buzz about the new music venue opening in March of that year at 645 East Georgia Avenue: Club Paradise. Opened by Andrew “Sunbeam” Mitchell, who’d had great success with his Club Handy on Beale Street, it was meant to be “something the entire town can be proud of,” as he said at the time, a classier alternative to other clubs in the city. And it was big, with a capacity of 2,500. That made it a perfect fit for the up-and-coming Stax Records label, just a stone’s throw away on South McLemore Avenue, as its stars continued to gain more and more serious traction on the charts.
Until recently, any notion of hearing the sound of Stax artists playing a steamy Memphis summer club date in that era seemed like a pipe dream. But that’s all changed with a new release from Craft Recordings, Stax Revue: Live in ’65!, out now on double LP or double CD sets, and sure to thrill any Stax fan who’s dreamt of time-traveling back to the earliest heyday of the little label that could.
The Club Paradise recordings, made in June or July of that epic year, fill the set’s first platter, and they’re complemented by recordings of the same group of Stax artists performing in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles only a month or so later, at the 5-4 Ballroom. Comparing the two sets can make the historical events of that year viscerally gripping, as the Stax Revue performs L.A. only days before the Watts Riots against the racist practices of the Los Angeles Police Department erupted. While the Memphis show is loose yet energized, the Watts show is positively frantic.
The 5-4 Ballroom recordings were discovered decades ago and released as Funky Broadway: Stax Revue Live at the 5/4 Ballroom, a CD on the U.K.’s Ace Records in 1991. Back then, as producer Alec Palao writes in the liner notes, “the discovery of the 5-4 Ballroom tapes was just part of the epic and ear-opening safari Ace’s Roger Armstrong had been making through the Stax vaults, a major excavation within back catalog circles.” And there were other tapes in the archives, but the Club Paradise recordings, mislabeled, were sitting on a shelf for decades until unearthed only recently.
As Palao explains, “I decided to investigate a reel Roger had told me about, labelled as assorted tracks by Scottish beat group The Fleets. Like many U.S. independent labels, of all hues, the advent of the Beatles’ unparallelled success led Stax to take a gambit on a British-sourced master, and as a fan of the single by The Fleets that the company issued (‘Go Away’ on the Volt subsidiary from August 1964), I thought this other material might be worth a listen.
“The tape had come from Decca Records in the UK and had clearly not been opened for decades, judging by the ancient masking tape that sealed the lid. But instead of banded masters as indicated by the legend, the box contained a loose ‘pancake’ reel, which upon playback revealed a lively location recording. With selections by The Astors, Wendy Rene, and David Porter, the between-song banter indicated the venue as Club Paradise in Memphis.”
The real centerpiece of the Club Paradise recordings is a string of tracks by Booker T. and the M.G.’s in what came to be known as the classic lineup of that quartet, only months after Donald “Duck” Dunn replaced original bassist Lewie Steinberg. This album is, in short, M.G.’s gold. But the four tracks by David Porter, who had yet to hang up his performer’s shoes to focus solely on songwriting for Stax, are also a revelation, and it’s clear he’s driving the hometown ladies crazy. “David Porter, that’s all right, baby!” one fan shrieks. And, topped off by Wendy Rene’s “Bar-B-Q,” the first disc/LP is absolutely, undeniably Memphis AF.
Furthermore, the L.A. sets, while mostly released 34 years ago, also hold some surprises, namely an incendiary version of “In the Midnight Hour” by Wilson Pickett, which was not included on the Ace collection. “Due to licensing restrictions,” writes Palao, “Ace was unable to include this Pickett tour de force upon the official CD release of the show in 1991. Now, we get to finally revel in the unexpurgated proceedings.”
All these raw tapes were rendered listenable by mastering engineer Joe Tarantino, while lacquers for the LP were cut by Memphis’ own Jeff Powell at Take Out Vinyl. At a listening session at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music last week, moderated by John Miller of Shangri-La Records, Powell explained the painstaking process of working with audio recorded in less-than-ideal conditions. He made it obvious that this was a labor of love.
“There’s definitely a different sound in the 5-4 Ballroom than what’s at Club Paradise,” said Powell. “And in my opinion, the Club Paradise recordings sound better. It’s a little more pleasing. They’re both really raw, you know, so that is the same between them, but the 5-4 Ballroom stuff has a little bit of a harsher sound to it. It’s been brightened up a little bit before it got to me, so I tried to tame it a little bit, to keep it from distorting on the vinyl and all that. But I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to match the two because they’re two different things. So you can have the experience of being in 5-4 Ballroom in L.A. and the energy that was going on there, compared to the energy that was going on at Club Paradise, which is where a lot of the cats who recorded at Stax would go hang out after they were done with their sessions. It still had that really cool energy, but it was a little more at home.”
Then Powell took a moment to reflect on historical changes in music, performance, and recording, by way of celebrating of this new time-traveling collection. “I think it’s important for records to all sound like they are from somewhere, you know? If they all sounded the same, then we’re back to making everything perfect. But just because you can fix everything doesn’t mean you have to. Anyway, they didn’t have the technology to make everything perfect back then. And the imperfections are what makes these records more beautiful.”