But, beneath the cha cha cha beat and the exuberant horns, listen carefully to the congas y timbales, the Afro-Cuban engine room of his band surely an influence on one Carlos Santana. I can’t resist this version, featuring another bandleader struggling against the turn of the musical tide. Machito & His Orchestra – Green Onions (Booker T & the MGs cover) His set of Beatles’ interpretations have lasted a whole lot less well. Big band sort of suits this style, horns already prominent in the originals. The album this came from, Basie’s in the Bag, mainly featured music from Stax and Motown, although Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” snuck in at the end. There are a host of versions in this format, but this is the front runner. If you shun any thought of Glenn Miller and think latter-day Zappa, it even becomes credible, if the piano then goes a bit supper club. Even when the horn section swoop in, it maintains some semblance of dignity. But this reinterpretation is a joy, especially the sotto voce piano and walking bass intro. Like most jazzers of the 40s and 50s, by 1967 Count Basie had been somewhat sidelined by the explosion of popular music, reduced to big-band versions of hits of the day. Count Basie – Green Onions (Booker T and the MGs cover)įrom the ridiculous to the sublime. An intriguing footnote is that both Rod Stewart and Steve Marriott once auditioned for the band. They play on to this day, still with a core of original members. They did vocals too, of a sneer and snarl easy to imagine.
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No organ here, just guitar, bass and those unforgettable drums. In the same vein as the nascent Rolling Stones and the Pretty Things, they were defiantly raw, with “a finesse that made the Pretty Things seem positively suave in comparison” (Richie Unterberger). A live version, it comes from Downliners Sect, who were neither a garage band from Albany nor punks from Poughkeepsie, hailing rather from an early 1960s London.
#Andrecover album stinky plus
Plus one liberal helping of good ol’ messy just for the hell of it.ĭownliners Sect – Green Onions (Booker T and the MGs cover)įor a song that so smacks of cool, how about this ramshackle version, all clatter and echo, enthusiasm trumping any sense of expertise? If Jackson was, in Cropper’s words, “the greatest drummer to ever walk the earth,” the drummer here probably isn’t, but his brash thumping has a bizarre appeal. But there are some absolute belters tucked away out there, where much thought has been taken to give a little more back to the tune than Booker T and co. Plus a shedload of ultimately weird discoveries, like the California Raisins and a pre-Beach Boys Bruce Johnston, doing little other than to let it sell their product, whether that be dried fruit or party music for co-eds. That includes a whole host of folk who should know better (looking at you, Tom Petty and Dave Edmunds), jumping on the coattails of the song for either a quick fix of audience nostalgia or a quick buck in a fading career. So what could you possibly do if you decide to cover this most iconic of instrumentals, other than to kill it or copy it? Which, pretty much, is what most versions do, often at the same time. Both of its time and timeless, it has become musical shorthand by film makers and advertisers to evoke a the image of the early 60s, all beehives and flat tops, prime American Graffiti-styled mythologizing. In the near 60 years since, it has never lost appeal, with numerous releases gaining a nod from successive generations. Once it had secured a few radio plays, it became apparent the a and b were the wrong way around, and they were flipped, with “Green Onions” racing up the chart, hitting a peak of number 3. Suitable as a b-side for a track, “Behave Yourself,” that had already been commissioned of them by Jim Stewart, Cropper rushed the tapes off to Scotty Moore at Sun Records to cut the disc. “To him they were funky because they were stinky,” Cropper later said.
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They called it “Green Onions” – green at label co-owner Estelle Axton’s suggestion, and onions because they were the funkiest thing Steinberg could think of. Utilizing a standard 12-bar format, and working from the germ of an idea of Jones, they largely improvised it into sounding something special. In 1962 they got some downtime to mess around on their own in the studio. They played on scores of the R&B hits of the day, backing Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Wilson Pickett, amongst many others. Jones, Steve Cropper, Lewie Steinberg, and Al Jackson were the core of the MGs, the house band of Stax Records in Memphis.