Memories and Monuments to the 1967 European Tour of the Stax/Volt Revue

Ranked on Q magazine’s list of The Best Gigs Ever, the 1967 concert headlined by Otis Redding at London’s Finsbury Park Astoria continues to resonate across the music spectrum.

We have released a newly discovered video (actually a film that has been transfered, remixed, and masterfully encoded as a digital music video) of Otis Redding performing “Try a Little Tenderness,” the final song on the London concert.

This is now available for purchase and download on the iTunes Store.

In 2008, Stax released the audio sessions from the 1967 concerts in London and Paris

This concert, the first stop on the legendary Stax Volt Revue European Tour, was performed on March 22, 1967 (nine months before Redding’s death in a plane crash) and continues to inspire new album releases (see Live in London:  Otis Redding, released in 2008 by Stax), television documentaries that reinforce the now mythical status of the Stax/Volt Tours.  (see the 2009 release of  Sweet Soul: Stax Volt Review Live on PBS stations), and radio specials (such as Welch singer and songwriter Cerys Matthews‘ 2009 reconstruction of the event for the first installment of popular BBC program, Wish You Were There).

London newspaper clipping about the Finsbury Park event

On Matthews’ radio, she noted that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were in attendance when Otis Redding sang at the Finsbury Park Astoria (in fact the Beatles had sent a limousine to the airport to pick up Otis Redding and the Stax Volt artists when they arrived in London).  This sparked  the memory of another fan, Christopher Grey who,wrote an article earlier this year for the Oxford Times called “When The Stars Come Out for Soul Greats”

Zelda Redding cites the European audiences for Otis' success

As the concert recedes into memory, it looms larger as a turning point in music history.   Otis Redding’s widow, Zelma Redding, has asserted that “It was European audiences who first demonstrated their true respect for Redding,” and it’s unlikely that Redding would have been invited later that summer to Monterey if he hadn’t captured the imagination of the European music scene.   There are plenty of other memories about the concert, and a plenty of music and cultural types who are confirming this event as a significant, important moment in music history.  Listed below are a few samples:

“They treated us like we were the Beatles or something,” said Steve Cropper in the book Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records.   “It pretty much overwhelmed everyone in the band.  It was a total mind-blower.  Hell, we were just in Memphis cutting records; we didn’t know.  Then we go over there, there were hoardes of people waiting at the airport, autograph hounds and all that sort of stuff “

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The Stax Volt revenue went to Norway after their concerts in London & Paris

Denis Pole of Sweet Jazz Therapy wrote: “Raw and hardworking, yet dapper too with influences rooted deeply in gospel and blues, the brash Southerners at Stax Records that forged Memphis soul were song-and-dance men who knew how to bring an audience to its feet.  Stax stars like Otis Reading oozed sensuality while the band that backed them (Booker T. and the MG’s plus the horns of the Mar-Keys) was racially integrated and musically unstoppable.  The shock waves that this new sound transmitted were felt far beyond the shores of the USA and when in 1967 the Stax / Volt Revue tour headed for Europe the event was captured on film.

The New York Times weighed in after the 2009 PBS release of the Stax/Volt tour:  The Stax singers commanded the stage with moves no choreographer taught them, and they didn’t rest until their audience became an ecstatic congregation.”

Were you there at The Finsbury Park Astoria when Otis and the Memphis sound came to London?  Let us know…and you have your own memories, please share them here.