Later Choruses
McLemore Avenue
Sitting in Los Angeles in 1969, Booker T. Jones was frustrated. He’d been a session man at Stax Records since 1960, starting when he was sixteen years old. He fell in with three other session men, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Al Jackson Jr. They were Good Secrets in the industry - unknown to the general public, but well-respected by other musicians. Cropper and Dunn ultimately gained some recognition for their work on the Blues Brothers movie; and today Jackson, who died young, is recognized as one of the finest drummers of all time (in 2016 Rolling Stone had him at #9). As the house band at Stax they helped create the label’s signature sound, and made their own albums under the name Booker T. & the MGs.
Jones hadn’t left Stax yet, but he was eyeing the door. The label treated him as an employee, not a creative artist. They tried to mollify him by making him a Vice President, but, he said “there were titles given (to us) but we didn't actually make the decisions.”
The Beatles’ new album, Abbey Road, came out that September. The Beatles liked Booker T. & the MGs, even sending a limo to meet them when they did their first European tour in 1967. “The Beatles were probably the biggest band in the world at that time,” Cropper said a few years ago — “and for them to even know who we were just blew us away.”
One gets the sense that the whole thing was a scintillating affair. The band certainly held up their end of the deal::
But for Jones, Abbey Road was almost a provocation, taking the band far beyond its traditional vernacular. “I thought it was incredibly courageous of The Beatles to drop their format and move out musically like they did. To push the limit like that and reinvent themselves when they had no need to do that. They were the top band in the world but they still reinvented themselves. The music was just incredible so I felt I needed to pay tribute to it.”
The result, released just six months later, is one of the sharpest cover albums of all time, McLemore Avenue. The band further honored the Beatles by adopting the now-iconic Abbey Road formation in front of the Stax studio in Memphis.
Some cover albums are a bit flat, but the music on McLemore Avenue is intoxicating. The first side is one long medley starting with the latter part of Abbey Road (Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, The End), which then moves on to Here Comes the Sun, and concludes with Come Together. The original is mashed up, re-filtered, and reimagined in the musical language of Memphis soul.
The result is not melodically worse, and may be rhythmically superior to its source - Booker T. & the MGs were a rhythm section, after all. Jackson was a master of ‘pocket drumming’ - staying in a groove but pushing and pulling the beat, gradually building up energy and releasing it. This gives McLemore Avenue a unifying structure that accommodates the wildly varied melodic material.
With one guitarist instead of three, Steve Cropper stays busy, meeting the challenge with some of the finest, most aggressive playing of his career. He acquits himself well on The End, and takes over George Harrison’s Something, transforming it in a minute or two from a conventional ballad to a full-on stomp jam, culminating in a power duet with Jones that I can fault only for its brevity. Dunn’s driving bass flips between duets with Jackson and Cropper, and Jones repeatedly extends himself with solos that go far beyond the original material, yet never lose the original vibe.
In 2017 the Maitre D’s, a Booker T. & the MGs cover band in Memphis, undertook a live performance of McLemore Avenue for the podcast Beale Street Caravan (linked below). It’s terrific, too, as is the photo they took for the occasion:
Melting Pot
The original lineup of Booker T. & the MGs made just one more album before going their separate ways. I first heard Melting Pot while I was working on a project at the office. I’d put on The Very Best of Booker T. & the MGs (the excellent Rhino compilation) as background music. When it finished, the service I was listening to clicked ahead to Melting Pot…and my head snapped up.
Melting Pot is not background music. Recorded in New York City (the only non-Memphis album they did), you can feel the energy of 1970 Manhattan seeping in from the opening beats. The Very Best of Booker T. & the MGs has a shortened version of the title track, but accept no substitutes: you need the full eight minutes. Booker T., normally a little laid back in his approach, plays with total commitment (“almost demonic intensity” - Bruce Eder), almost as if he were willing himself into his post-Stax future.
This is the way.
The band is right there with him. As studio players and sidemen they’d all learned the virtue of restraint, but at the same time were well into their own careers, and expanding their individual musical interests. Everyone sounds a bit more modern on Melting Pot than they had on all those Stax singles back in the 60s. But they had played so long together, and so well, that there is no sign of fragmentation. It does not become, as The White Album had for the Beatles, a showcase of individual talents at the expense of the group’s identity.
Instead, Melting Pot becomes the mic drop for Booker T. & the MGs, a concluding masterpiece that arrived, like Abbey Road, a few years too soon.
Melting Pot on Youtube (link)
McLemore Avenue on Youtube (link)
Beale Street Caravan, “The MD’s Tribute to McLemore Avenue” (link)
EXTRA CODA: Booker T Jones Tiny Desk Concert, 2011