The great American organ player on famous collaborators, the tragedies that have befallen his band, and leading a multiracial group in a segregated society

Booker T Jones: 'Otis Redding seemed possessed. We just went along with it'

Hi, Booker. How's it going?

I'm good. I'm at the Kenilworth Hotel in London.

Can you remember your first visit to the UK?

It would have been for the Stax-Volt tour, with Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd and Carla Thomas (1).

Donald "Duck" Dunn of your group the M.G.'s described the tour as "the most impressive thing I've ever done in my life". What made it so good?

Like me, he was a southern boy from a not so well-to-do neighbourhood in Memphis, Tennessee, and to come to London at all was a feat. The tour itself turned out to be extraordinary, everything about it.

Who was your most surprising fan?

Carla said the Beatles were there in a club we hung out in. I don't remember meeting them - those guys looked the same to me.

Could you not tell John Lennon from Ringo?

I wasn't looking for them, actually.

You recreated the whole of side two of Abbey Road, didn't you? (2)

I did, out of absolute admiration.

When was the last time you had to Sound the Alarm? (3)

[Mildly irritated] It's Sound the Alarm because Booker T has been simmering for years and now Booker T is hot, boiling over: sound the alarm, I'm on fire.

Ah, OK. And you're back on Stax. Is it based in the same building, with the same staff?

It means the world to me. It's my home. Coming full circle and being on a label that I helped start. I used to live two blocks away and it defined my life. Now it's in Beverly Hills, with different people, but they still have the Stax feeling.

Is anybody left from the 60s?

Booker T.

Is it true you were at school in Memphis with Isaac Hayes and Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire?

Maurice was my classmate and Isaac and I were friends. Isaac picked up a lot of his piano [ideas] from standing behind me. Maurice was my first drummer at high school. My mom used to make sandwiches for him. David Porter [later Hayes's writing partner] also went to school there. It was a fertile ground.

The M.G.'s were the Stax house band. How did they compare with the other house bands – Motown's Funk Brothers, Philly's MFSB and the Muscle Shoals sessioneers – in terms of proficiency and funkiness?

Weeell … We were never mistaken for the Motown group and they were never mistaken for us. We were a lot simpler than them; they had strings and were more pop-sounding. The Muscle Shoals group we were mistaken for a couple of times because our sound was so close.

To bring up Wilson Pickett, did you spend much time with him in the midnight hour?

[Humouring the interviewer] He [Pickett] wrote that with Steve [Cropper, guitarist] and Steve pretty much produced it with Wilson and established a new sound there.

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It was 50 years ago this month that you reached the top three for the first time with Green Onions. How did you celebrate?

I don't remember celebrating. I was at Indiana University at the time (4), which was a challenge. The Green Onions thing didn't seem real, and it could have been a fluke as far as we knew.

How often do you find yourself in a bar and they ask you to play the keyboard riff on the piano?

Pretty much every time. How often do I oblige? Most every time! [Laughs]

How instrumental – no pun intended – was the track in the birth of funk?

That's a good question. It was such an original sound. I think it was very instrumental in the birth of the Memphis sound. I think funk music would have happened without it, though.

In the 80s it seemed as though every American movie featured a Stax or Motown track. Which provided the fattest royalty cheque?

Probably Green Onions in American Graffiti.

Is it true that you wrote Time Is Tight while watching Paris burn during the 1968 student riots?

No. It happened before the riots. I was in northern Paris, writing music for the movie Uptight. The Sorbonne uprising was a complete surprise to me and everyone else. I had trouble getting back to my hotel.

Did you join in?

No. I was completely disabled (5). I had a cast from my upper hip down to my toes and all the time I was in Paris I couldn't walk. I had crutches and a wheelchair. Besides, I wasn't that much of a maverick. I would be now, probably, but not then.

Were the M.G.'s the first racially integrated band, and as such an influence on Sly and the Family Stone?

As far as I know, we were, although I don't know if we had any influence on Sly.

Did it cause problems with booking gigs?

Not with booking gigs, but it caused problems with travel. The hotels and restaurants were segregated so we had to be creative when it came to getting food, and staying overnight we had to sneak in the back door of hotels. Either that or not stay.

So one half of the band would have been in a different hotel to the other half?

No, all the hotels were segregated, so either we [Booker T and drummer Al Jackson Jr] would be staying illegally in a white hotel or they [guitarist Cropper and bassist Lewie Steinberg] would be surreptitiously staying in a black hotel.

Was that annoying, or did you just accept it?

We just accepted it. It was the 60s, although it was about to change pretty soon.

At the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, is it true you wore matching chartreuse suits?

Yeah [laughs]. That was a carry-over from our UK tour where we wore mohair suits.

Did you feel estranged from the counterculture?

Yes, we were estranged from it. That was a new scene and the question that night [at Monterey] was, would they accept us? And they did.

Can you remember the first time you met Otis Redding?

Uh-huh. The beginning of the meeting was commonplace because it was just a cursory "hello" – he was carrying in luggage for the band he was working for, just a gopher, really. Then afterwards he asked to sing and once he started to sing our relationship changed.

Was he up there with Elvis and Sinatra?

I would have to say, in terms of being a unique individual, yes. He was striking. But he was a very unassuming person.

What was it like recording Otis Blue in 36 hours? Intense?

It was, but he [Redding] seemed to be possessed at that time. Nobody was quite sure what was going on with him. He just seemed to be in a hurry. Not a hurry – obsessed. And we didn't understand why. We just went along with it. If he wanted to go for 24 hours we just did it.

Were those sessions coffee-fuelled, or anything more illegal?

Oh no, Otis wasn't doing drugs. I never saw him smoke marijuana, nothing. He didn't do it around me, anyway.

How about the M.G.'s? Did you indulge? Or were you clean cut?

I was, yeah. Until I moved to California [laughs].

Did you join the love-in crowd?

A little bit. To some extent. Not too much. I couldn't have the health I have now if I had done what everybody else was doing.

How deeply were you affected by the murder of Al Jackson, in 1975? (6)

I was in Los Angeles and I walked up to my father's house at maybe four or five in the afternoon. He normally on a warm summer day would keep the front door open and the screen door closed. The TV was situated so that you could see it from the street. And as I was walking up to his door I saw my name on the TV screen, and of course I continued to walk. And that's how the story was revealed to me. I opened the screen door and my mom was watching it on TV. That's when I learned of his death.

It must have been quite a shock.

It was amazing, unbelievable, a strange sequence of events. When he came to California previous to the shooting that killed him he'd also been shot. He showed me the bullet wound on his chest, which he survived.

Courtesy his estranged wife, Barbara?

Yeah.

And you'd only just reformed the M.G.'s?

It seemed like it had just been a couple of weeks that he had been shot by her before this happened. It wasn't long.

Do you think the M.G.'s' history was marred by tragedy?

Oh, absolutely. Otis's death, Al's death – they couldn't have taken more main characters than those.

If they hadn't died, would the M.G.'s and Stax have prospered throughout the 70s and 80s?

Looking back I can say that there would have been hiccups, even with them. In terms of the music business interfering in Stax's progress. I don't think it would have been as smooth as it looks like it might have been.

You've worked with everyone from Willie Nelson to Bob Dylan and Neil Young. What were they like?

Each situation was different. Bob was my neighbour in Malibu and he would come to my studio. Willie was a neighbour, too – he had the apartment underneath mine – and we'd hang out. But Neil and I met working on the Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. He was a Booker T and Stax fan, he liked funk, so it was a good marriage.

You don't normally associate Neil Young with funk. Folk, yes.

Yeah, but he started in funk bands up in Toronto (7).

Did you ever have to reprimand them for getting out of line in the studio?

Wow. Let me think about that. Of course if that happened I wouldn't reprimand anybody. That's not my nature. I guess I've been fortunate in that the people I've worked with haven't had egos and the situations haven't gotten out of hand.

Did Stax really turn down Aretha but agree to do an album with Lena Zavaroni? (8)

Who's Lena Zavaroni?

She was an 11-year-old X-Factor-style TV pop contest winner with a big voice.

Either that's something I've blocked out of my memory or I wasn't involved. I can't tell you.

Have you blocked many things out of your memory over the years?

It wouldn't be blocked out of my memory if I could tell you, would it?

You once admitted you "suffer bouts of prolixity". How come?

I'm fascinated with language, especially English. I'm a nerd when it comes to words.

Do you have a favourite?

No, but one of my father's favourites was "auspicious".

You've also said: "Without art, life is meaningless." Surely even the greatest Van Gogh isn't worth a slap-up meal when you're starving.

You say Van Gogh, but it could be any piece of beautiful art: people just stand there and stare at it. Why are they lingering? Even a song played at a wedding is a piece of art. It colours our lives.

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What's your greatest artistic achievement?

I would have to say Time is Tight.

Because of the memories?

Because of the simplicity of the melody. It's one of the hardest things to do, to write a melody that people don't forget.

Is it worth hanging on a gallery wall?

Well, that would be egotistical to say that. I'm just gratified I had something to do with creating it.

Footnotes

(1) Back to article The leading lights of Stax toured England and France in 1967.

(2) Back to article 1970's McLemore album comprised instrumental versions of Golden Slumbers et al.

(3) Back to article Booker T Jones's 10th solo album, Sound the Alarm, is out now on the revived Stax label.

(4) Back to article He studied classical music composition.

(5) Back to article He'd had surgery to replace the bone in his knee following deterioration after years of rubbing against the wooden bar underneath his Hammond organ.

(6) Back to article In July 1975, his estranged wife Barbara had shot him in the chest, but he survived. Three months later, he was shot dead at his home by intruders.

(7) Back to article In the mid-60s Young was in the Mynah Birds with Rick "Superfreak" James.

(8) Back to article The album Ma! He's Making Eyes At Me by the Opportunity Knocks star was released by Stax in 1974.