Stax Discoveries

In its first 17 years, Stax cranked out a whopping 673 singles, so we'll forgive you if you missed a few life-changing listens. Albert King blends glassy-smooth double-entendre vocals with leather-tough six-string licks in the funkified electric blues of "Crosscut Saw." Booker T. & The MG's toss a dash of six-gun soul into the spaghetti western kettle with their version of the theme from Clint Eastwood's "Hang 'Em High." And Johnnie Taylor's "I Ain't Particular," with its voodoo beat and razor-crease horn section, is perhaps the greatest Temptations track they never recorded — not to mention a terrific intro to the underrated ex-Soul Stirrer who was rightly dubbed the Philosopher of Soul. (Special super-picky note: Yes, we're aware that Wilson Pickett and Don Covay released their songs on Atlantic, but they were cowritten by Steve Cropper and recorded with the house band at Stax Studios. Stax enough for you? It is for us.)

In Next Steps, we'll discover that, judging by what they sang, the Stax roster was jam-packed with very unhappy women.

All those fabulous leading ladies at Stax, and hardly a love song among 'em; it's either men gone bad, or women gone bad, or relationships gone . . . well, you get the picture. The gut-jabbing horn section in "Running Out" slams hard up against Mable John's last nerve as she dispenses with her man courtesy of a two-fisted funk-blues knockout. Turning from the ditcher to the ditchee, Mavis Staples is painfully readjusting to the single life when her no-good hound dog of an ex slinks back for a slow dance — which he won't get — in the dry-eyed divahood of "I Have Learned to Do Without You." And hot-blooded desire fills the air in an uneasy mix of flop sweat and cheap perfume straight through Ruby Johnson's steam-powered slab of soul "If I Ever Needed Love (I Sure Do Need It Now)."

In Deep Cuts, we'll hear from a band that changed its name and found success, a band that kept its name after suffering unspeakable tragedy, and more.

Weirdly enough, all of our featured bands found their biggest success in the wake of a personnel shift — and not always a happy one. After trimming from a sextet to a five-piece, the Dynamics even ditched their name, morphing into the Dramatics . . . and they couldn't have been more dramatic than in their high-tension wire of a blaxploitation movie packed into a three-minute single, "Beware of the Man (With the Candy In His Hand)." Backing Otis Redding was both the Bar-Kays' greatest triumph and tragedy, as two-thirds of the band died in the plane crash that also claimed the life of the King of Soul. Recovered, regrouped, and reinvented, they emerged barely a year later, and their chitlin-and-collard-green-funky "In the Hole" sizzles in its greasy groove. And the Soul Children, recruited to fill the Stax roster slot vacated by Sam & Dave, put the adult back in adultery, delivering the lowdown on the down-low in their hush-hush slow-dancin' rendezvous "I'll Understand."

It took 28 compact discs to hold all the singles Stax released between 1959 and 1975 . . . and that's just the A-sides. Add to that the hundreds — maybe thousands — of monster album cuts, B-sides, previously unreleased vault finds, and other stray bits, and you've got a mighty mountain of musical greatness. While many of them were hits in their own right, even the ones that weren't sounded like they could've — no, make that should've — been. From the snake-bite blues of Albert King to Black Nasty's bubbling cauldron of funk, from artists you think you know, like Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes, to artists you probably don't, like Wendy Rene and Rance Allen, we've cherry-picked the very best and put them all right at your fingertips.