A Year of Blind Spots: Green Onions

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Green Onions

Booker T. & the M.G.s

1962

What 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die has to say about Green Onions by Booker T. & the M.G.s:

Every few years in the early days of rock, an instrumental slipped through the endless ranks of vocal discs and shot to the top—Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk" in 1956, or the Champs' "Tequilla" in 1958, for example. In 1962, it was the turn of "Green Onions," an insinuating organ-guitar blues song that reinvented Jimmy Smith's organ jazz for the pop market, highlighted by taut snatches of guitar. Booker T. & the M.G.s were the most soulful bar band in the whole world.

The album that followed, fronted by its photo of fresh green onions ready for a Southern stew, featured the hit (an improvised studio jam recorded while the group were waiting to start a recording session), along with grooves like the slow-burning "Behave Yourself" and R&B covers of Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman" and Smokey Robinson's "One Who Really Loves You." Other highlights include dynamic reworkings of pop tunes like Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore" and "Rinky-Dink," and the jazzy "Comin' Home Baby." In time, the Stax sound behind Otis Redding and Carla Thomas became famous, and we finally learned who the mysterious M.G.s were: organist Booker T. Jones, guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Duck Dunn, and drummer Al Jackson—unusually for a Black music label, Cropper and Dunn were white.

In 1962, Green Onions' short, unadorned tracks sounded ultra cool, Cropper's stinging lines cutting through Booker's mellow chords. Green Onions is a truly seminal album: its naive vigor and rock-soul fusion were to inspire the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a generation of Southern blues-rockers.

What Joe has to say about Green Onions by Booker T. & the M.G.s:

Pretty tough for the album to recover after its title track, which is the very first song on the album. "Green Onions," it must be said, is almost definitively the coolest song to ever exist. I've talked about this phenomenon before, how certain songs lend themselves to walking around, feeling like the coolest motherfucker on earth. "Green Onions" is probably the first song to ever exist in this made-up genre. Every other cool walking-around song spawns from the syncopated organ melody of "Green Onions." It was so cool, it even made an animated Addams Family movie bearable. 

My expectations for this album as a whole were set appropriately, don't worry. I knew it wasn't going to revolutionary, since it was released in 1962, pre-Beatles. I knew that the deep cuts weren't going to have the impact that the well-known hit does, because how could they? And I knew that I was gonna recognize a few covers, but the fact that there are a lot of covers meant that this wasn't that deep of an experience. "Green Onions" isn't there to make a statement. It's just fun. The titular album follows suit.

I have tossed around the idea of getting into this album for a while now, and I"m glad that 1001 Albums finally convinced me. Honestly, I think the aforementioned Jimmy Smith and his Back to the Chicken Shack were helpful in this experience. I wasn't sure if Green Onions was going to be "too old," so I laid the foundation by listening to something in a similar vein but even older. Jimmy Smith brought the organ to jazz, and then Booker T. brought the organ to pop. It has to happen in that order.

I'm honestly not even too concerned about the importance of the organ here. If this band was called Lewie S. & the B.G.s—and why shouldn't it, Lewie's bass is almost as important here as Booker's organ—then I wouldn't have batted an eye, I don't think. No one is better at their instrument here than anyone else. This is a tight group, at the top of their game. I never knew that, about "Green Onions" coming from a fuck-around session before the real music was played for pay. That doesn't just happen by accident! It only happens when the musicians are this good!

I will also argue that, when it comes to instrumentals, they don't become hits arbitrarily. Not every good instrumental becomes a hit, but every hit instrumental is good. You can add your own story to it, and that's what makes it fun. But what makes it good is the talent involved. If you wanna walk around and feel like one cool motherfucker, then pop in the earbuds and hit play on Booker T.