Booker T. & The MGs

If this album ended after the lead-off, eight-minute title track, it would still be a classic. The song's opening blues guitar figure is short and sweet and accented by a clipped organ that gradually opens up as the drums break into a gallop. It's difficult to get through the first two minutes -- much less the entire first song -- without re-listening again and again. This album is essentially the swan song of Booker T and the MGs original line-up, and it's an auspicious bow.

Eclectic is a word only recently in vogue, but Memphis music has always been eclectic, a
melding of the musical and social forces that converge on the town from all sides. Memphis'
top-of-the-delta position has always made it a repository for some of the best of the
Mississippi Delta styles, but the folk ballad filtered in early from Eastern Tennessee and
Appalachia. These two white and black traditions, as well as the influence of go... More >

Here the Memphis motorvators surpass the somewhat boxy rhythms that have limited all their albums as albums except for Uptight, which had vocals. Al Jackson's solidity, a linchpin of rock drumming as surely as Keith Moon's blastoffs and Charlie Watts's steady economy, is unshaken by the shifts the arrangements demand, and his deftness permits a more flexible concept in which Booker lays back some on organ and Steve Cropper gets more melodic input. A Vegas-jazz ("L.A. Jazz Song" is a title) boop-de-doo chorus upsets the balance of side two pretty badly, but for the first twenty minutes this is unbelievably smooth without ever turning slick. (Grade - B+)