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.”
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Cary Baker • (323) 656-1600 • cary@conqueroo.com
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