Is this the coolest music that has ever been recorded? I don’t mean cool in the sense of fashionable (though it is) or appealing (though it is), I mean it in the sense of laconic confidence in its bad self.
Booker T and the MGs recorded the tune without a title, and then when the record started to blow up, they had to name it in a hurry. They were considering calling it “Onions” or “Funky Onions” to honor its intense stank, but they were worried that might be off-putting, so they opted for a milder vegetable. Guitarist Steve Cropper tells the story of the recording here; he’s so Southern it hurts!
Can you imagine writing a tune that’s this elemental? It feels more like something that has existed for millions of years, and that Booker T dug out of the side of a mountain. A lot of its power comes from the groove: it’s heavy swing, basically 12/8 shuffle, but nobody is playing constant triplets, so it feels more like funky hard bop than straight blues. Al Jackson Jr just smacks out a simple backbeat all the way through, and Lewie Steinberg plays the bass riff undemonstratively and without embellishment. Only the best musicians are wise and confident enough to play this minimally.
The timbres are powerful too: the cold smooth slabs of Booker T Jones‘ organ against the hot jangly scrapes of guitar. Electric organs aren’t velocity sensitive, meaning that the keys are just on-off switches for notes at a constant volume. You can control the overall volume level with your foot, but the notes will still all be at the same level as each other. That flat, smooth dynamic contributes to the organ’s laconic cool. Electric guitar, on the other hand, is exquisitely sensitive to how hard you play, so every one of Steve Cropper’s squawks is a dynamic surprise.
As far as notes on the page go, “Green Onions” is pretty simple, but simple does not mean boring. The tune is mostly a straightforward twelve-bar minor blues in F, but with a few quirks.
The blues doesn’t really respect the major/minor distinction. More accurately, blues tonality is a distinct category from major or minor, combining elements of both. The roots of the chords are usually on the notes in the blues scale, but the quality of those chords can vary. In “Green Onions,” the basic formula is two beats of a chord, one beat of the major chord whose root is a minor third up, and one beat of the major chord whose root is a perfect fourth up. The chord roots spell out the beginning of the blues scale: 1^, b3^, and 4^. But this little cell has strange effects when you transpose it.
- In the first four bars, the chords are Fm7, Ab, Bb. The rising bassline is in contrary motion to the falling top notes of the riff; that’s good counterpoint! All of these chords are built from the notes in F Dorian mode.
- At bar five, the figure moves up a fourth, and the first chord becomes dominant instead of minor: Bb7, Db, Eb. The Bb7 is still made from notes in F Dorian, but the Db is from parallel F natural minor. (The Eb belongs to both Dorian and natural minor.)
- At bar nine, the figure moves up a fifth, and the first chord becomes dominant again: C7, Eb, F. The C7 and F are from parallel F major, which is pretty surprising.
Steve Cropper only plays the last chord in each bar, which he plays on the last eighth note, the “and” of four. Thanks to the heavy swing, he’s practically playing on the next downbeat. This makes it sound like he’s playing Fm13 early rather than Bb or Eb late. Hip!
Let’s talk about the organ and guitar solos that occupy most of the track. Booker T plays his solos in F Dorian, but he treats it more like minor pentatonic with occasional 2^ and 6^ sprinkled in for color. These solos are models of economy and melodic structure, with lots of internal call and response. Steve Cropper’s solos are just distorted riffs with such wild bends that it’s hard to tell what the pitches might “really” be. He transposes them up and down following the pattern of the main melody, and the blues scale does very strange things harmonically when you move it in parallel like that. For example, #4^ becomes the leading tone when you move it up to IV, and it becomes b2^ when you move it up to V.
The only problem with this track is that it’s so short. I’d be up for at least forty more minutes of it. I looped the intro in Ableton, and it’s a remarkably complete musical experience unto itself, especially with the little “yeah” right before the first guitar stab comes in. I also tried slowing down the first sixteen bars by a factor of thirty using Paulstretch, and it is very relaxing.
Update: read a different take on Steve Cropper’s part from Wenatchee the Hatchet