The Entroporium

Wattstax catches Soul and the Black Power movements at a critical time of transition. The Sound of Black America was shifting away from indie labels like Stax and Motown, while majors like Warner and Columbia were quickly muscling their way in with money and “distribution deals.” Soul artists, meanwhile, were finding it harder to reach a white mainstream audience – and the Afrocentric styles and attitude of the day probably didn’t exactly help either. The money was shifting into the major media centers, radio was re-segregating and so was the rest of the culture industry. As urban Americans of all races were more & more forced by law and by economic circumstance to live closer to each other, their lives ever more intertwined, American culture was rapidly re-balkanizing after the halcyon days of ’60s soul – “The Sound of Young America.”

Stax’s evolution was a perfect example of this cultural shift. After the bi-racial triumphs of artists like Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Booker T & The MG’s, Stax started to move away from the mainstream (though the quality of the music remained very high). The label was at a crossroads, having ejected or alienated most of its white management and keystone musicians in place of a paranoid gun-toting regime under Al Bell. The pinnacle moment came in 1972 when at the behest of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the label funded a concert in Los Angeles to showcase many of its remaining hit acts. Meant to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots, Wattstax took place on a Saturday afternoon in the cavernous Memorial Coliseum.

With over 100,000 seats, this was an unforgiving place for what was essentially a restaging of 1950s-style showcase tour, each act getting maybe 30 minutes to run through its hits and quit the stage for the next act. The stage was placed at the 50-yard line, seats were sold towards in a horseshoe towards one end zone and the 60-70 yards of field between the stage and the seats was left open. Schlitz kicked in for a sponsorship, so all the seats were $1, bringing out many folks that probably had few opportunities to see concerts.

For acts that typically performed in clubs and churches, this was at best a daunting situation, and unsurprisingly some acts fare better than others. Albert King and Pops Staples don’t make much of an impression, while the science-fiction Afro craziness of the Bar-Kays brings down the house. Rufus Thomas’s spastic dancing and razor wit also cut through, but his nearly his short peach jumpsuit is what’s really memorable about his brief set.

Headliner Isaac Hayes, nattily attired in his trademark chain mail, was the only performer to go on after dark, but even with that advantage he doesn’t have the charisma to overcome the stage set-up. Riding high on his current smash hit “Theme From Shaft,” Hayes had only recently become a performer. Starting as a house songwriter for Sam & Dave and others, his breakthrough album Hot Buttered Soul was so lightly regarded by the label that he was forced to record it outside the Stax studios and cut the whole thing in one take. It also didn’t help that Hayes elected to simulate the “Shaft” string arrangements by playing over a rickety 1972 click track.

The film of Wattstax was re-released by Warner last year in a “30th Anniversary Special Edition.” What’s evident is that Stax didn’t want to simply make a concert movie, but rather create a collage of urban life in 1972 Los Angeles: a Black Power-oriented view of the Watts community and its consciousness. The film opens with an effective montage of street scenes over The Dramatics’ “What You See Is What You Get.” The cameras also visit churches, barber shops and the streets of Watts to capture the sound and thought of contemporaneous black culture. A particularly rich bonus is that Richard Pryor is interviewed several times in a nightclub, basically doing his then-current act.

The consciousness scenes are not entirely successful, though. The presence of Ted Lange, best known as Isaac from The Love Boat, rapping with “his brothers” in a barber shop about ghetto life throws the “spontaneity” of the documentary sequences into doubt. It’s also curious that Stax, so rooted in the South by its sound, staff and tradition, would only choose to portray LA and skip the South entirely.

The “dialogue” and styles are so dated that Wattstax becomes essential viewing as a historical document; surely portraits of the ‘real life’ of ’70s American black life are few and far between. (The only alternatives that leap to mind are the horrific Blaxploitation movies that ironically made superstars of some of Soul’s most ‘conscious’ artists.) The crowd concert scenes showcase an incredible array of colorful clothes and gravity-defying hairstyles that we’re unlikely to see again in our lifetimes. You may want to keep your hand on the Fast Forward button for some of the boring bits, but if you’re at all curious about Stax, its artists and its demise, Wattstax is well worth your time.

[Soundtrack]
Bar-Kays – Son of Shaft.mp3

[Recommended Further Reading]
Peter Guralnick – Sweet Soul Music