POP MUSIC : The Memphis Motown : Stax Records’ Southern-Fried R&B--saluted; in a new box set--was often grittier and more soulful than the music of its Detroit rival

Ask 10 soul music fans to name the greatest soul record label of the ‘60s and nine will say Motown. But the remaining person may well counter with Stax Records.

There are days--especially after hearing a couple of classic Stax singles by Otis Redding or Sam & Dave--when you are tempted to agree.

Stax didn’t match Motown in terms of the number of great artists or in sociological influence. But the Memphis-based company’s gospel-accented R&B; intensity made its most striking recordings every bit as moving as singles from Motown.

In his book “The Heart of Rock & Soul,” critic Dave Marsh included eight Stax singles in his choice of the 200 best records of the rock era. That’s not as many as Motown placed on the list (23), but it’s four more than a giant like Columbia Records, which only landed two singles each by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

Marsh’s Stax selections--including records on its sister label Volt--ranged from Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” and Sam & Dave’s “Hold On I’m Comin’ ,” to Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and Booker T. & the MGs’ “Green Onions.”

All eight singles--plus 236 others by such artists as Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor and Albert King--are contained in “The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968.” It’s a massive, nine-disc CD box set that contains every single released by Stax during the decade that it was distributed by Atlantic Records.

That is far more Stax music than even a fan of ‘60s soul music is going to want, but the set stands as a valuable reminder of the label’s musical purity and purpose, qualities that are all but lost in today’s corporate record world.

Pick up a Capitol, MCA, PolyGram, Sony or Warner Bros. record now and you have no clue as to the quality or even nature of the music inside. But the name Stax--along with such other great independent labels from the ‘50s and ‘60s as Motown, Sun and Philles--stood for a particular sound and direction.

Stax’s specialty was a spicy, Southern-fried R&B;, usually even grittier and more soulful than the frequently pop-flavored Motown product.

“People always ask us if we thought of Motown as our competition and I guess indirectly they were,” says guitarist Steve Cropper, one of the architects of the Stax/Volt sound. “We were the only other R&B; label that was doing (a big volume) of business, but I didn’t really see that much connection between the Motown music and the Stax music.

“To me, they promoted their artists with an eye toward a crossover pop sound and we didn’t. We really tried to stick to our ethnic roots, which may sound funny, me being a white guy. But that was our mission. We loved R&B; and we didn’t want to change it for a pop audience. We just wanted to make it better.”

The new Stax box set, due in stores Tuesday and selling for $99, doesn’t get off to a fast start.

Except for Carla Thomas’ dreamy “Gee Whiz,” there is barely enough interest in the first of the hour-plus discs to make you want to listen to the rest of the set--unless you know what is to come.

But there is one other track that should pique anyone’s interest--an instrumental by the Mar-Keys titled “Last Night” that contains many of the sensual textures, including jabbing horns and a sinfully seductive rhythm emphasis, that later defined the Stax/Volt sound.

It’s easy after all these years to imagine Jim Stewart, the founder of Stax, listening at the end of the day to a playback of the song--which became a Top 10 hit on the pop and R&B; charts in the summer of 1961--and thinking, “If only I could find a great voice to go along with that great sound.”

Within a year, he had found that voice in Otis Redding, who recorded for Stax for only five years before he was killed in a 1967 plane crash, but who stands arguably as the most stirring male soul singer of his generation.

Listening to the set--which also includes such prized singles as Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” Rufus Thomas’ “Walking the Dog,” Carla Thomas’ “B-A-B-Y,” Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” and Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign”--one can hear an inspired master plan at work at Stax.

But according to Stewart, a lot of what happened was, at least initially, accidental.

The primary surprise in the Stax story is that it started out as a country label.

Stewart worked in the bonds department at a Memphis bank in the mid-’50s and moonlighted as a fiddler in the house band at a country nightclub. Elvis Presley was getting started around town and the future rock legend used to sing at the club when Stewart’s band was on break.

Still in his 20s, Stewart got together in 1957 with Fred Bylar, a country disc jockey and singer in Memphis, and made a demo record of Bylar singing a Stewart song called “Blue Roses.” When Stewart couldn’t sell the record to an existing record company, he put it out himself on a label that he named Satellite.

The record didn’t sell, but Stewart was hooked on the record business. After cutting some records in nearby Brunswick, Tenn., Stewart and his sister, Estelle Axton, leased an old movie theater on East McLemore in a black section of Memphis and converted it into a studio, record store and office. The new name Stax was taken from the first letters in Stewart’s and Axton’s last name.

They first turned to what Stewart knew best, country music, but then switched suddenly and completely to R&B.;

“I heard Ray Charles’ recording of ‘What’d I Say’ one day and . . . I don’t know . . . it just opened up something inside me,” he said in a recent interview. “I had heard R&B; records before, but nothing with as much feeling or substance. I still loved country, but once I made that step to R&B;, I felt at home musically. It was like a flower opening up in front of me. I never looked back.”

In many ways, the eventual Stax sound was a perfect extension of the gospel and R&B; roots celebrated in “What’d I Say”--and one of the treats of the new box set is watching the fascinating, gradual evolution of the sound as a small cadre of studio musicians and songwriters honed their craft.

The core group included keyboardist Booker T. Jones, guitarist Cropper, drummer Al Jackson Jr. and bassist Lewis Steinberg (eventually replaced by Duck Dunn), who called themselves Booker T. & the MGs. They not only had hits of their own (including “Green Onions” in 1962), but also played on countless Stax sessions.

It was around that time that Redding, who was barely into his 20s, entered the Stax picture. He didn’t have an appointment when he walked into the old theater on East McLemore with Johnny Jenkins, who was the guitarist with Redding’s band, the Pinetoppers. Jenkins was scheduled to record some instrumentals that day and Redding accompanied him to Memphis, hoping to talk Stewart into recording him, too.

“The funny thing is I thought Otis was just Johnny’s driver because I saw him carrying some equipment into the studio,” Cropper recalls of that session. “But Al (Jackson) said, ‘Man, this guy keeps bugging me for someone to listen to him.’ So, at the end of Johnny’s session, we sat down at the piano and Otis started singing ‘These Arms of Mine’ and I thought, ‘Holy mackerel. This guy has got something.’ ”

Redding’s “These Arms of Mine,” which reached the Top 20 on the R&B; charts, is the sixth song on the second of the nine CDs and it set a standard that isn’t always matched in the remaining body of work. But there is a sense of integrity and commitment throughout the remaining eight hours of music in the set.

“Everything we did at Stax was a team effort,” Stewart says now. “I think my contribution was in being able to put the right combination of people together creatively. We didn’t know at the time we were developing a sound. There was never an idea that we were going to be different or make a new sound. We just did what we felt was right at the time for a particular record and song.”

Stax was so admired that its distributor, Atlantic Records, sent artists to Memphis in hopes of riding on the coattails of the Stax sound. Stewart and Cropper, for instance, helped launch Wilson Pickett’s career on Atlantic by producing “In the Midnight Hour” and “Ninety-nine and a Half (Won’t Do).” Atlantic also borrowed a Redding song and much of the Stax sound for Aretha Franklin’s signature 1967 hit, “Respect.”

The Stax story didn’t end in 1968. There were massive hits by such artists as Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers and Johnnie Taylor after the distribution agreement with Atlantic ended that year.

But the company changed.

There were a series of legal and financial twists and turns, and the early sense of family gave way to division and bitterness. The company was sold to Gulf & Western, was bought back and was then involved in a much-publicized distribution deal with Columbia Records that eventually soured. Much of this decline--which ultimately ended in the company’s closing its doors in 1976--is chronicled in Peter Guralnick’s book, “Sweet Soul Music.”

As the Stax set heads to the stores, two reunions are being explored.

The three surviving members of Booker T. & the MGs (Jackson was shot to death in his home during a reported 1975 burglary attempt) got together in a Nashville studio earlier this month to work on some things with an eye toward getting a new record contract.

Stewart, meanwhile, has been talking to Carla Thomas about making some more records together. She hasn’t recorded since her Stax days.

Like Stewart and Cropper, Al Bell--a former disc jockey brought in by Stewart in the ‘60s to head promotion and marketing--looks back on the Stax era with a combination of pride and sadness.

Bell, who went on to become president of Stax, thinks much of the company’s early success was due in part to the unity of purpose among the team of Stax musicians and writers (headed by David Porter and Isaac Hayes) and by their musical diversity.

“You had this great balance of backgrounds and styles,” suggests Bell, who now lives in Los Angeles and runs both a gospel and a pop record label. “You had Steve Cropper, who was a white guy who loved blues, but had rock ‘n’ roll influences. You had Al Jackson, who loved blues and soul music, but who had a jazz background because his father was a jazz musician.

“You had Duck Dunn, who was a bass player who loved basic R&B; music, but who had country influences. Then, you had Booker T. who was studious, the intellectual, who brought something altogether different to the music. And all this was going on in a city that was heavily segregated, so there was this real sense of building something together.”