CONCORD
MUSIC GROUP RELEASES
BOOKER
T. & THE MGs’ GREEN ONIONS
AS
PART OF ITS STAX REMASTERS SERIES
JULY 24, 2012,
RELEASE DATE CELEBRATES 50th ANNIVERSARY
OF LANDMARK
R&B INSTRUMENTAL ALBUM
Title track
inducted into GRAMMY Hall of Fame in 1999 and Library of Congress's National
Recording Registry in 2012
LOS ANGELES,
Calif. — Concord
Music Group will release Booker T. & the MGs’ Green Onions as
part of its Stax Remasters series
on July 24, 2012. Enhanced by 24-bit remastering by Joe Tarantino, two live
bonus tracks and newly written liner notes by Grammy Award-winning Stax
historian Rob Bowman, the reissue not only spotlights one of the most
entertaining and influential soul and R&B recordings of the 1960s, but also
reaffirms the album’s enduring nature a half-century after its original
release.
Underscoring
the historical significance of this 1962 recording is the recent decision by the
Library of Congress in Washington, DC, to add the album’s widely recognized
title track to the National Recording Registry. The song was selected for
preservation because it is “culturally, historically or aesthetically
significant,” according to a Library of Congress announcement at the end of May
2012.
“Green
Onions,” the leadoff track to the album of the same name, was a number one
single on the Billboard R&B chart — a rare accomplishment for an
instrumental track — and eventually climbed to number three on the
Billboard Hot 100. But the title track is just one song on a watershed
album by the instrumental R&B combo that served as the house band for the
Stax label and the backup unit for some of the most iconic soul and R&B
artists to record there in the 1960s, says Nick Phillips, Concord’s Vice
President of Catalog A&R and a producer of the Stax Remasters
series.
“Beyond
‘Green Onions,’ which was their biggest hit single,” says Phillips, “there are
so many other great songs on this album which Booker T. & the MGs
transformed into timeless R&B instrumental classics, like ‘Comin’ Home
Baby,’ ‘Twist and Shout,’ and Ray Charles’s ‘I Got a Woman.’ No matter what song
they started with, by the time they were done with it, it was uniquely and
unmistakably their own.”
The album’s
original 12 tracks are executed by the lean but formidable roster of organist
Booker T. Jones, guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Lewis Steinberg, and drummer
Al Jackson, Jr. The reissue also includes two bonus tracks — live renditions of
“Green Onions” and “Can’t Sit Down,” both recorded at the 5/4 Ballroom in Los
Angeles in August 1965. These extra tracks — which Bowman describes in his liner
notes as “turbo-charged, extended, uber-muscular versions” — include Donald
“Duck” Dunn replacing Steinberg on bass and joined by Packy Axton on saxophone
on “Can't Sit Down.”
“In the
annals of American music, there have been only a handful of rhythm sections that
have all but single-handedly set the course for a whole genre of music,” says
Bowman. “In the case of Booker T. & the MGs, the genre in question is
Southern soul music. Although Southern soul has its roots in select 1950s
recordings by James Brown, Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles, the genre coalesced in
the early and mid-’60s at Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee, where Booker T.
& the MGs served as the ‘house band.’”
He concludes:
“Together, Green Onions and the live cuts from the 5/4 Ballroom provide
a good sense of the very early days of the incomparable Booker T. & the MGs
. . . Soul simply doesn’t get much better.”
