Watching the concert footage from Stax/Volt Revue: Live In Norway 1967, even in spite of the spotty sound quality, one can't help but be blown away by the performances. Listening to Booker T. and The MGs playing the opening bars to "Green Onions", watching Sam and Dave propel themselves into orbit, and feeling the power and charisma of Otis Redding is as much a testimony to the importance of Stax to popular music as anything anybody could say. While the documentary half of the Stax DVD set, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story does a great job in tracing the company's history, and does a really good job of letting the viewer make their own decisions about its chequered past, it occasionally seems to lose focus and wander away from what made Stax really important — the music.
Together, the two discs that make up The Stax DVD make a convincing argument that if Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton hadn't opened their recording studio and started Stax in 1961, popular music would have missed out on something incredibly special. In fact it's impossible to imagine what pop music would sound like if the doors to that movie theatre in downtown Memphis had never opened.
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