Concord Music Group to Release Booker T. & The MG’s “Green Onions” on July 24th, 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.”