GARY LUCAS posted this
Booker T. & the MG’s performing “Green Onions” Live in ’67
“Green Onions” was born out of dead time at Stax Records.
In 1962, Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Lewie Steinberg and Al Jackson Jr. found themselves with time to fill during a recording session for singer Bill Lee Riley. They recorded an instrumental called “Behave Yourself” with Jones on Hammond M3 organ. Stax co-founder Jim Stewart liked it enough to consider releasing it, but they needed another song for the other side of the single. Booker T. remembered a riff he had been playing on piano and moved it onto the Hammond. The band worked around it, keeping the arrangement spare and letting the groove carry almost everything. Jones holds the centre with the organ riff, Cropper answers with clipped guitar phrases, while Steinberg and Jackson keep the rhythm section locked underneath them. That second recording became “Green Onions.”
The musicians behind it were also becoming the core house band at Stax, playing on records by many of the singers who would define the label’s sound. “Green Onions” gave them a record of their own, built from the same economy and rhythmic discipline they brought to those sessions.
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Gary Lucas
