Various Artists: Stax Does The Beatles : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The interplay of music and race in the Sixties is usually perceived as a one-way street — white musicians drawing on (or, worse, ripping off) the songs and styles of black artists. Stax Does the Beatles demonstrates that the influence occasionally ran in the other direction, to delightful effect.

A hotbed of funk intensity, the Memphis-based Stax label housed a stable of hit-makers who wrote and produced their own material, but were also keen interpreters. In the Beatles, artists like Otis Redding, Booker T. Jones and Isaac Hayes heard terrific songs that they could put their own imprint on. They also heard a route to musical experimentation and a potentially larger audience.

Redding's combustible version of "Day Tripper" (a 1966 single included here in an alternate version) dispenses with verses and choruses, while supercharging the song's killer riff. Hayes, meanwhile, transforms George Harrison's "Something" into an eleven-minute psychedelic extravaganza. Booker T. and the MG's combine soul and mystery in their instrumental readings of "Eleanor Rigby," "Lady Madonna" and "Michelle." MG's guitarist Steve Cropper takes "With a Little Help From My Friends" as the occasion for both melodic, jazz-style exploration and roaring fuzz-tone leads.

Beatles songs, alas, could also be seen as the route to lucrative supper-club bookings, an ambition evident in Carla Thomas's overwrought version of "Yesterday." But Stax Does the Beatles documents the meeting of world-class talents. The whole may not be greater than the sum of its incomparable parts, but it's certainly worthy of them.