Booker T and the MGs
Listen/Download – Booker T & the MGs – Melting Pot
Greetings all.
I hope that those of you located in the path of the big snowstorm are well, shoveled out and warm. Unlike the last time storm, during which my snowblower was locked in the tool shed, its get up and go having got up and went, the most crucial of snow battling machines was up and running this time, making for a much neater, much less labor intensive experience. There’s still a shit-stack of the white stuff surrounding the Funky16Corners compound, but ingress and egress are assured.
This week is another one of those Funky16Corners ‘theme’ extravaganzas, in which I dip into the vault and run a Sesame Street – ‘How are these things like one another’ – game on you, but provide you with the answers (or at least my version thereof).
Last year, one of my major reading experiences was Tim Lawrence’s book “Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979”. Lawrence’s tome, along with Peter Shapiro’s ‘Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco’ (since retitled) and Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s ‘Last Night a DJ Saved My Life’ when taken together form a de fact encyclopedia of modern DJ culture. All three are well written and deeply informative, but more than that, they introduce you to a couple of seminal personalities without whom DJ-ing (and dance music) would not exist as it does today.
Because of these three books, I came away with a deep and abiding respect (bordering on idolatry) for the work of David Mancuso. It was Mancuso (pictured above), who in 1970 threw the first dance party in his loft (which became The Loft), calling it Love Saves the Day (get it? Nudge, nudge say no more…). Though there were many other important figures in DJ culture (especially Francis Grasso who paved the way for Mancuso in New York City), for me, Mancuso rises above all others.
From the very first time I entered a DJ booth, I’ve endeavored to create an experience for the people on the dance floor turning solely on the gears of good music. Some of it was rare, some of it extremely common, but the idea was to drop the needle on something that the dancers would dig, and do my best to lift the room. Years later, when I became aware of Mancuso through the books listed above I realized that he was in many ways the ur-DJ.
If you’ve spun records for a crowd, you already know (or should) that nothing feels better than laying down some quality sounds and feeling the energy on the dance floor build, incrementally, layering record on top of record, shifting the tempo up (most of the time anyway) but always attempting to build on that increase with a parallel increase in the quality of the music coming out of the speakers. There’s something to be said for the idea that on a perfect night, a DJ is something akin to the ancient cats drumming around the fire, whipping their fellow tribesmen into a lather, drumming harder as they dance faster until the lot of them were participants in a musical hive mind of sorts, connected by the beat. When you’re spinning records, sometimes it only comes together for a couple of songs, sometimes not at all, but when it does there’s nothing better. Certainly the vast majority of people in a dance club are there first and foremost to have a good time, but there’s no reason in the best of all possible worlds that it can’t also be elevated to the spiritual level.
Before you can get to that specific place, a DJ has to do two fundamental things.
First and foremost, keep your ears (and your mind) open. The more you listen to, and the more time you spend among others that really know and seek out good music the larger your internal repertoire/reference library is going to be.
Second, and if you’ve spent any time following the going on here at Funky16Corners you probably picked up on this one: keep digging. The more time you spend actively seeking out new music in the field, the more likely it is that when the time comes to pull some heat out of your crates and drop it on the ones and twos that you’ll be making a good choice.
Certainly there’s the issue of taste, but even that can be improved with enough study.
That all said, what I came away from all three of those books knowing about David Mancuso, was that his tastes were expansive. A look at his playlists reveals that alongside many accepted classics (many of those placed in the canon by Mancuso and his contemporaries) there were a lot of – for lack of a better term – ‘unusual’ choices. Half a decade before guys like Kool Herc and Flash were cutting rock breaks in the Bronx, Mancuso was playing all manner of rock, jazz, world music and pop sounds at the Loft, alongside a healthy portion of what are now considered ‘consensus’ dance records.
Remember, we’re talking about an era where the large majority of genres that rule the dance club world today hadn’t yet been codified. ‘Disco’ was years away from common usage and 12” singles – with their dance floor specific extended versions – did not yet exist. Though there were some records on his playlists that are now considered part of the vanguard of what would come to be known as disco (especially some Eddie Kendricks jams, one of which will be featured later this week), Mancuso mixed in just about anything else that made sense in the context of his sets.
The Loft parties, though conceived on an intimate scale, were hugely influential, with regular attendees/devotees including Nicky Siano (the Gallery), Larry Levan (Paradise Garage) and Frankie Knuckles (the Warehouse, from which ‘house’ music got its name) all of whom went on to marks on dance music culture in their own ways.
The first track I’m going to bring you this week is a perfect (capsule) example of all that was great about the Loft. Oddly enough, the first time I heard Booker T and the MGs doing ‘Melting Pot’ it was on a 45, with the vast majority of its power stripped away. After reading about its place of honor at the Loft, I sought out the 1971 LP of the same name. I finally scored a copy when I was DJing down in DC last year. Once I got it home and had a chance to drop the needle on the LP version of the title song, it became obvious why Mancuso used it at the Loft.
‘Melting Pot’ is, inside of its eight minute playing time, a microcosm of an entire set. The song opens with rimshots by Al Jackson, but it’s Steve Cropper’s pulsing rhythm guitar that sets the pace. When Booker T’s organ and Jackson’s drums come in the groove is locked down. The band – one of the tightest of the classic soul era – only really works up a full head of steam at the three minute mark, which explains why the 45 lacks the punch of the LP version.
It’s important to note the atmosphere in which the ‘Melting Pot’ album was created. It was the last album by the classic MGs lineup. Booker T Jones was fed up with the new regime at Stax and was on the verge of leaving the group. He refused to record in Memphis, so the album was recorded on the road in NYC. The sound of the album is a serious departure from the band’s earlier work, revealing a more expansive, more progressive Booker T and the MGs. While tracks like ‘Chicken Pox’ – with the MGs channeling the Meters – show that they might not have been leading the pack anymore, a cut like ‘Melting Pot’ shows that had they stayed together, they might very well have moved to the front once again.
As I mentioned before, ‘Melting Pot’ is almost like a small, self-contained DJ set. The song has several distinct sections in which the MGs bring up the tempo gradually, hit a peak and then chill out, only to re-state the groove again and again, bringing the dancers along for the ride. Listen at around 4:15 where Jones and Duck Dunn fall back, leaving Jackson and Cropper to rebuild the song from the opening statement. Dunn drops back in with a repeated, almost circular bass line, and Jones solos over the top of it all. I can only imagine what Al Jackson’s punchy bass drum accents sounded like pouring out of the Loft’s sound system. While ‘Melting Pot’ is clearly not ‘disco’ as it came to be known, the second half of the song is definitely a prototype for extended dance mixes to come. The temptation, as the song fades out just past the eight minute mark, is to cue up a second copy and keep the groove going.
‘Melting Pot’ which was the last 45 by the classic Booker T and the MGs line up, and strangely enough the flip side is another drastically truncated long jam,’Kinda Easy Like’ which also runs over eight minutes on the LP. It grazed the Pop Top 40 and hit the R&B Top 20. Following the ‘Melting Pot’ album, Booker T Jones would leave the group and relocate to California where he would work with artists like Bill Withers. Cropper would also leave the fold, with Dunn and Jackson reconstituting the MGs with a new organist and guitarist.
All in all, ‘Melting Pot’ is – at least for those that haven’t heard it – a revelation, and a great way to start a week of Loft tracks.
I hope you dig it, and I’ll be back on Wednesday with something cool.
Peace
Larry
PS: Don’t forget this Wed 2/10 at Master Groove @ Forbidden City – DJ BlueWater, DJ Prime Mundo, DJ Prestige
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