Everything about Booker T. and the MGs’ classic “Green Onions” came together organically, like a good gumbo.
They’d only just added Booker T. Jones, a hot-shot young organist, when the song’s signature groove emerged in the Stax studio. And they weren’t even supposed to be the headliners that day, Steve Cropper once said.
The MGs, in fact, were only there to back up a rockabilly star named Billy Lee Riley, who’d hit with “Red Hot” and “Rock With Me Baby.” When Riley didn’t show, Booker T. and the MGs started fooling around with the spare time, and a piece of musical history was made. Even then, though, “Green Onions” might not have ever happened, if Stax Records owner Jim Stewart had not surreptitiously recorded the group while they jammed.
All that was left, Steve Cropper tells us in an exclusive Something Else! Sitdown, was to come up with a title. Booker T. and the MGs took a similarly off-handed approach. In fact, when Cropper brought the demo down to a local radio station, “Green Onions” – later officially released in August 1962 to great fanfare – didn’t even have a name yet.
“A guy named Reuben Walker was the DJ on WLOK during drive time,” Steve Cropper tells us. “I took the song down to him, and told him I wanted him to hear what we’d cut. It didn’t have any title. He listened to it, just the intro and the first part of the verse — and he immediately put it on the air. He ended up playing it four times a row. People were calling wanted to know what that was. Everybody was calling about the song.”
And it still had no title. “The phones were lighting up, there and at the record store where I worked at the time, but it didn’t have a name,” Steve Cropper adds. “Lewie Steinberg [the MGs’ original bassist, before the late Donald “Duck” Dunn took over] said: ‘Let’s call it “Onions,” ‘cause that was the stinking-est music I’ve ever heard!’ I thought, well, onions are negative: They make people cry; they give you indigestion. But people like green onions; you always have them on salads. There you go.”
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