Booker T and the MGs

A few weeks ago I bought Elvis Costello's Get Happy again, this time the 2 CD set from Rhino. 50 songs. In the liner notes he mentions that when they were making this record he picked up a bunch of Stax singles and that the bassline for "Temptation" was taken from the Booker T and the MGs song "Time Is Tight", so I really wanted to hear that song. Booker T and the MGs are best known for their instrumental song "Green Onions". You know it. If you've ever gone to the movies and sat through trailers then you've heard it. They always play it to show that a character is cool. Anyway, I've also been obsessed with the movie The Blues Brothers (and 1998's Blues Brothers 2000) and the Blues Brothers Band feaures two MGs: Steve Cropper (who I first heard of when he played on Frank Black's Honeycomb LP) and Donald "Duck" Dunn (Dunn recently died). The Blues Brothers was on last night so I watched it again. The songs are so good, especially Ray Charles doing "Shake A Tail Feather" and Aretha doing "Think". Aretha also has some great lines in the movie and she nails them- "Don't you blaspheme in here! Don't you blaspheme in here!" and "So you can leave without your dry white toast, and without your four fried chickens, and you can leave without Matt "Guitar" Murphey!" The best thing that happened last week is that I was flipping around and one of my movie stations was playing a documentary called Respect Yourself- The Story of Stax. It told the whole story of Stax Records and was narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.