CD Review: Booker T. & The M.G.'s - Stax Profiles - Page 2

Along their collective path, every member of the group had an important and necessary contribution, both to the band's sound and to Stax itself. Booker T. Jones himself was only 16 when he played saxophone on the Rufus and Carla Thomas track "Cause I Love You," Stax's first hit, released when the label was still under the moniker Satellite. Beyond his keyboard and organ skills, he was also a strong songwriter, and cowrote plenty of Stax hits, perhaps most notably Albert King’s "Born Under a Bad Sign." Meanwhile, Steve Cropper, the M.G.'s guitarist and a legend in his own right (Mojo Magazine rated him the #2 guitarist of all time in 1996, right behind Hendrix), also had a lot of weight at the label. He cowrote classics like "Knock on Wood," "In the Midnight Hour," "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," and others every man, woman, and child in the English-speaking world has heard at some point in their lives. He also served as an A&R man, and had an important role at the boards, being one of the head producers at the label and turning out more Stax singles and LPs than anyone's had the patience to catalogue. Al Jackson (Jr.), the man behind the kit, laid down the locomotion. As compiler Elvis Costello writes, he was the "perfect motor of so many Stax sides."And we shouldn't forget Donald Dunn, the man on bass who replaced original bassist Lewie Steinberg after the group's second LP, and whose flexible grooves and self-taught style filled out so many great tunes.

As with the rest of the albums in the Stax Profiles series, all the cuts here are selected by somebody you'd expect to know their stuff; this time around, the ever-affable Elvis Costello is our compiler. "Any fan of this marvelous combo," he writes, "is going to have a sequence in which their favorite tracks might play on an imaginary jukebox." Costello's jukebox is stuffed with all the eclectic and overlooked stuff you'd expect him to dig: with selections like two live tracks from a 1965 concert unissued until the early '90s to a track off the band's Abbey Road cover album McLemore Avenue, Costello's got us deep in his realm of taste. Just don't expect this disc to have all the hits and essential material, because as the jukebox metaphor shows, the album reflects more of Costello's eccentricities than a general consensus about the group's work: a good chunk of what's on display here are rare cuts and B-Sides that the average Joe will only be able to find on Stax's three-disc Booker T. box set or the group's lesser known LPs. That's not to say that all of this compilation is obscure; plenty of recognizable material is here, from the group's biggest hit, "Time is Tight" to "Green Onions" (in a live version) to "Hip Hug-Her." Luckily, in either case Costello's liner notes are as thick and descriptive as you'd expect from the walking musical encyclopedia he is: the sonic stuff Stax records are made out of are, after all, a large portion of what Costello's buttered his bread with throughout his career. He starts the mix off with the mellow organ hum of "Time is Tight," and from then on goes through several workouts and cool-downs, ending with lesser-known tune "Fuquawi."

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