The Mighty Duck

The Law Firm of Jones, Dunn, Cropper and Jackson Esqs

Listen/Download Booker T and the MGs – Sing a Simple Song

Listen/Download Booker T and the MGs – Chicken Pox

 

Listen/Download Booker T and the MGs – Melting Pot

Greetings all.

I had other plans to start the week (how many times have I typed those words in the last year?) but when I woke up this morning and turned on my phone, the very first thing I saw, while I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes was news of the passing of the mighty Duck Dunn.

Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, the longtime bassist for the legendary Booker T and the MGs died in his sleep while on tour in Japan.

He was 70 years old.

It is at this point that I make a somewhat embarrassing confession (at least as far as soul is considered) that being that the first time Duck Dunn really came onto my radar was as a member of the Blues Brothers.

I was 16 years old when ‘Briefcase Full of Blues’ came out, and like zillions of others my age (and otherwise) I bought the album.

Though I knew who Booker T and the MGs were – ‘Green Onions’ was then, and still is an elemental part of my musical foundation – I had never heard the names of Dunn and guitarist Steve Cropper before the Blues Brothers came onto the scene.

That album was the first place my fragile young mind touched base with the sounds (once removed) of Junior Wells, King Floyd, the Chips and a few others. As odd as it may seem, that first Blues Brothers album (I never bought another) was a serious jumping off point for me (as many other unlikely records would also be in the following decades).

What I didn’t know at the time, was that I was already deeply in love with the sound of Booker T and the MGs, via their role as Otis Redding’s band on the Monterey Pop recording.

I didn’t start buying soul 45s until I was in my mid-20s, but when I did I grabbed each and every Stax 45 that popped up in front of me, whether at record shows or at dusty flea markets (there twarn’t no interwebs back then, kids…), and many of them were either by Booker T and the MGs, or featured some or all of them as the backing band.

The decades that followed saw me – like any other self respecting soul fan – picking up Booker T albums wherever I found them.

While their oeuvre was, like every other instrumental band of the era, seasoned liberally with filler, they had more high points (and quite a few Everests) in their catalog than just about any other similar outfit.

The MGs were as tight as they came, with Dunn and uber-drummer Al Jackson creating as deep a pocket as has ever been heard.

The selection of songs I bring you today is by no means comprehensive, but I think you’ll find it quite groovy nonetheless.

There will be no Green Onions served, since Dunn wasn’t yet a member of the group* when it was recorded.

I have included a very tight Sly and the Family Stone cover, and two brilliant tracks from the last album the band did together.

Their cover of Sly’s ‘Sing a Simple Song’ comes from their 1969 LP ‘The Booker T Set’ and opens with a bit of a drum break from Jackson, soaked thoroughly in reverb, before the band kicks in. It sees the heavy kick of Jackson’s bass drum move into a more explicitly funky place, and while it never really moves into Sly-esque overdrive, it is tasty indeed.

‘Chicken Pox’ the first track from the group’s 1971 LP “Melting Pot’ (the last by the classic line-up) is the sound of the Meters breathing down the MG’s collective neck. The band is moving into a funkier place, and doing so with style, but the spectre of their Crescent City competition always seems to be there. Oh, how I wish this one was on a 45…

The last cut I bring you today is the title cut from ‘Melting Pot’, and by far one of the most interesting things they ever did.

Lasting in excess of eight minutes, ‘Melting Pot’ is important not only because it shows signs of the MGs stretching out into more progressive directions, but also because it became one of David Mancuso’s deeply influential Loft parties in New York City.

I’ll spare you an excess of words here, but if you have any interest in digging a little deeper, you can refer back to the piece I wrote on the record in early 2010.

Suffice to say, if all you ever knew was ‘Green Onions’, ‘Melting Pot’ will be a revelation.

Duck Dunn was – in addition to his better known gigs – a prolific session musician, both during and after the Stax era.

He was a legend, and he will be missed.

See you later in the week.

Keep the faith

Larry

 

 

*Though Dunn was a longtime part of the Stax/Memphis crew, being a boyhood friend of cats like Cropper and Packy Axton (Dunn was in the Mar-Keys) he didn’t join the MGs until he replaced Lewis Steinberg in 1965

Also, make sure that you check out the links below to the Be The Match Foundation and POAC (click on the logos for more info).

 

Check out the Funky16Corners Store at Cafe Press

PS Head over to Iron Leg too.

Mister Rufus Thomas

Listen/Download – Rufus Thomas – The Preacher and the Bear (Live)

Greetings all.

The tune I bring you this fine day is one of those lucky finds that manages to work on multiple levels.

First and foremost, it is undeniably funky, and I love few things more than stumbling upon a funk record that I haven’t heard before.

Second, it brings with it a very interesting story, in which our man Rufus Thomas gets to step inside a song – three quarters of a century old (when he recorded it) – and turn it inside out.

It was a short while back that I managed to find myself at the intersection of free time and a few extra dollars on the corner of look, record for sale.

There was another one of those record/garage sales at the Asbury Lanes, which have over time fluctuated between an embarrassment of riches (as far as vinyl is concerned) and occasionally yielding what folks have since time immemorial referred to simply as jack shit.

I didn’t have much green lining my pockets this time out, which didn’t matter since the first box I flipped through yielded a half dozen very nice 45s, all in the one or two dollar range, and the next table I hit coughed up a couple of cool LPs, one of which gave up the track you see before you.

With that, the bank was broken and I decamped for a fish sang-weech and the ride home.

Now, when I picked up the ‘Rufus Thomas Live Doing the Push and Pull at PJs’ album, and finished staggering through the very lengthy and awkward title, I decided to grab it because it contained live versions of a couple of his favorites, which I surmised might be very cool.

What I did not suspect, is that there would be a track that would good and truly blow my mind.

Rufus Thomas was a righteous dude, for a variety of reasons (all good, all having to do with music) and anyone that would waste your time arguing otherwise deserves little more than a kick in the shins.

He made some of the finest, funkiest records that Stax ever put out, many when he was well into middle age.

When I first dropped the needle on the live version of ‘The Preacher and the Bear’, I was grabbed by the spoken intro:

‘Here’s a song I understand is very popular out this way, out here on the coast.
Now, it is done differently in the club.’

But Rufus pronounces the last word ‘cluurrbb’ with an emphasis that implied that the live venue was something quite different from the studio*.

He wasn’t kidding.

What I didn’t know when I first heard the record and not until I sat down to research this piece, was that Rufus had recorded a studio version of ‘The Preacher and the Bear’ in 1970 (#42 R&B).

It has been reissued a few times (you can get it here), and it has to be said while the 45 version is lively, it is a radically different construct than what Rufus and his band laid down at PJs, and in comparison very weak broth indeed.

The title of the song was vaguely familiar, and when I listened to the lyrics they were similarly so (for good reason).

As it turns out, ‘The Preacher and the Bear’ had been around for ages. It was first published in 1903 and recorded a few years later by Arthur Collins (reportedly the first million selling recording).

It was, in it’s original form, what was known as a ‘coon song’, i.e. one that portrayed a racist image of blacks (in a wide variety of settings) often sung in what was supposed to pass for negro vernacular and often exaggerated accent.

The basic story – of a hypocritical preacher gone hunting on the Sabbath and getting treed by a bear for his sin – changed little over the years (aside from the removal of the overt racist context and the term ‘coon’).

‘The Preacher and the Bear’ was re-recorded/reinterpreted many times over the years, in a variety of musical settings, actually becoming a hit in versions by Phil Harris (1947) and Jerry Reed(1971).

Since Thomas was performing with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in the mid 1930s , it’s possible that he had been hearing (if not actually performing) the song for decades.

The song was almost always delivered as a humorous tale with the preacher petitioning the lord to deliver him from the bear as he had delivered Daniel, Jonah and others in the bible from their travails.

While Rufus Thomas made humor and important component of his discography, what he does with ‘The Preacher and the Bear’ is something else entirely.

As he said in the intro, the song was indeed ‘done differently in the club’.

Where the studio version of the song is briskly paced, with an almost Chicago blues style to it, the live version is much funkier, with a guitar line that sounds like a not so distant cousin to Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘Bold Soul Sister’.

Thomas and his band attack the song from an entirely new angle, using the hard edge of the music to add a touch of actual danger to the tale.

The lyrics of the song follow a familiar path until Thomas reaches the chorus where he makes some subtle but (very) important changes.

Earlier versions of the song generally reference Daniel, Jonah, and the “Hebrew children in the furnace” (aka Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) all tales from the Old Testament where people were saved from certain death by the intercession of god.

Thomas replaces Noah with Samson and ends the chorus with a reference to David and Goliath, both stories where the heroes were endowed directly with supernatural strength that allowed them to triumph in their time of troubles.

When Thomas charges into the chorus there is fire in his voice.

You remember Daniel from the lion’s den
Samson strong as a hundred men
The Hebrew children in the furnace of fire
David when he killed Goliath
The good book do declare!

It is as if he is no longer in the cluurrbb, but in chu’ch, which gets even clearer when the band falls back and Rufus starts to preach, adding a whole new chapter to the tale, in which (in the midst of hand-to-claw combat) the preacher reminds god that he protected him from bombs, guns and shrapnel when he was over in Vietnam.

Rufus engages in a little back and forth with the audience that has momentarily been converted (transubstantiated?) into a de facto amen corner with the organist in the band playing as if he were adjacent not to the bar, but rather the choir loft.

When Rufus starts to invoke Vietnam he adds a layer of sadness to the song that was never really there before, and the listener is compelled to wonder if in fact the struggle with the bear hadn’t become (at least in this case) a metaphor for the black experience in the 1960s.

All of those old bible stories told people that if they were faithful and followed the commandments that the good lord would be there for them in their time of need.

When I listen to Rufus drop down into the ‘Vietnam’ section of the song it sounds like he’s relating the story of someone who feels that they’ve finally been forsaken.

Is it possible that the ‘World’s Oldest Teenager’ had reached back into the early years of the century to take an old “coon song” reconstruct it on an angry frame and shoot it back out into the ether?

I think it is.

I hope you dig it too.

 

Peace

Larry

 

 

*It should be noted that over the last century the music behind ‘The Preacher and the Bear’ has often changed drastically in different settings. I have heard a similar tune behind some of the country versions of the song from the 30s on, but the Rufus Thomas recordings of the song diverge from those (and each other)

 

 

Also, make sure that you check out the POAC link below (click on the logo). It’s a fantastic organization that provides services to our local autism community, with education and recreational events, and any contribution you could make would be greatly appreciated.

 

If you want one of the new Funky16Corners stickers (free, of course) click here for info.

Check out the Funky16Corners Store at Cafe Press

PS Head over to Iron Leg too.

Packy Axton (2nd from left) with some Memphis heavies…

Listen/Download -Martinis – Hung Over

Greetings all.

First, some important news.

The day before yesterday I found out that I was going to have to change the domain where the Funky16Corners Blog and web zine reside. Unfortunately I had very little notice and the change was made rather hastily.

As a result, a lot of people that come looking for the blog using the old funky16corners.lunarpages.net links are going to find NOTHING. If you use the www.funky16corners.com, or just funky16corners.com (no WWW) you’ll still get here.

The problem is, blogging being what it is, a lot of the incoming links are located in places where they aren’t likely to get changed any time soon, and it’s going to take Google a while to rediscover the content here.

In the interim, I would appreciate it, that if you’re associated with a blog or website that links here, please adjust the links accordingly. If not, please just pass the word along, via Twitter or Facebook, that we have moved.

As I explained briefly yesterday, the switch over to the new domain should appear largely seamless – completely so in regard to new content – but there will be some effect on older stuff.

The graphics have to be restored to all posts prior to last November.

The links should be working in the Radio Show, Podcast, Guest Mix and Soul Club archives. If you find any broken links, please let me know.

This is an especially hectic and stressful time already, and I may have missed something here or there.

Thanks – as always – for your patience.

__________________________________________________________________________________

That said, today’s selection is one of those records that have been staple in my crates for a long, long time, and I can’t honestly say why I never featured it before.

Why am I posting it now, you may ask?

Because it is, quite suddenly, timely.

A while back I provided some very minor assistance in the research for the folks assembling the Light In the Attic compilation ‘Charles Packy Axton: Late Late Party: 1965-1967’ for which they very graciously (and surprisingly) thanked me in the liner notes.

Long-time readers of the blog will be aware that packy Axton features prominently in one of my favorite sagas, that being the story of the Packers ‘Hole In the Wall’ (more here) and its reappearance as a single by a cat named Joe S Maxey (as well as the vocal cover by the Other Brothers).

Ever since being clued into the various recorded exploits of Charles Packy Axton in Rob Bowman’s excellent book ‘Soulville USA: The Story of Stax Records’ I have picked up Packers record where and whenever I find them.

Axton, the son of Stax co-founder Estelle Axton, was a saxophonist and a hard living party animal who expired prematurely in 1974 at the age of 32.

He was, through the 60s a member of the Mar-Keys, and recorded with a revolving cast of characters (that often included Stax heavies and the Hodges brothers of the Hi records house band) under the names the Packers, the Martinis and the Pac-Keys, as well as providing backing for singles by singers LH White and Stacy Lane.

Thes 45s are collected in the aforementioned Light In the Attic comp, which if greasy, low down R&B and soul is your bag, ought to be on your shopping list.

The tune I bring you today, ‘Hung Over’ is the very essence of smoky, late night grooves, until it is rudely interrupted by the sound of someone making a very loud noise, which I (and many others) assumed was simulated (?) vomiting, but according to the liner notes of the comp, was actually Packy’s version of an angry growl.

The flip side, ‘Late Late Party’ is built on the same frame.

The various and sundry Axton-related 45s run from not too expensive to very much so, so if you’re not dedicated to finding them and shaking out your wallet, picking up the CD might be a better idea.

I hope you dig the tune, and I’ll see you all on Friday.

 

Peace

Larry

 

 

 

 

If you want one of the new Funky16Corners stickers (free, of course) click here for info.

Check out the Funky16Corners Store at Cafe Press

PS Head over to Iron Leg too.