Booker T and a Cursor Oasis
The first of 64 quartets: Booker T and the MG’s. I think I started following music writer Chris O’Leary at @bowiesongs shortly after David Bowie’s death. The account has been a fountain of music journalism and fandom, photos, reminiscences, snippets, pointers, and branching forays into other pursuits.
Most recently, Chris announced a new labor of love, 64 Quartets: “This is a study of 64 QUARTETS. They are not the 64 best quartets. They are not all my favorites, nor likely yours. The rules for inclusion in this series are precise and arbitrary.” As I clicked in I dumbly and incorrectly assumed it’d be classical quartets. But there bursting forth in the first entry is a long, juicy, sunrise-to-sunset chronicle of Booker T. and the MG’s and its members. Prior to jumping in, like many others I knew their mindblowing breakout tune Green Onions, but not a ton else about them. O’Leary’s writings bring social context, human, personal life moments, and musical explanations and explorations together. It is an extremely satisfying journey with rich textural elements throughout.
A favorite excerpt about the simple magic behind Green Onions:
“An occupational hazard if you’re [lead guitar] Steve Cropper is that if you go to a blues bar, you’ll be asked up on stage to play “Green Onions.” Cropper’s fine with it. It’s just that bar bands get “Green Onions” wrong.
They know how to play his lines and the bassline, but the drummer never nails Al Jackson’s part. “Green Onions” is in 2/4, but “the ride is playing straight fours, the kick is going dom dom da-dom dom—it’s a sort of half-shuffle thing in the foot,” Cropper told Jim Payne. And keyboardists play it like a second-string church organist, all splayed fingers and heavy-handed chording. But Jones glides and pivots, his fingers dancing down the treble end of the organ’s upper keyboard, playing sets of fifths for the theme/bassline. It’s as if he’s consoling his notes while he’s sounding them.
He credits it to his childhood piano teacher, who taught him to keep his fingers arched and to “crawl”—hold down one key while moving your other fingers to their next positions, so there’s always a drone note to cotton the melody’s progress. (You can see him demonstrate it to Keyboard in this video.)”
Also:
“Booker T. and the MG’s did a ferocious performance of “Green Onions” at the 5/4 Ballroom in Watts days before the riots started. Cropper sounds like he’s chopping through metal. “They were holding lighters and matches and saying ‘burn baby burn’ and we thought they just loved us to death, but, naw, they were talking about something else,” he recalled to Gordon.”
There are so many great passages and links out to performances and photographs throughout, but I’ll stop there. Click on in.
Give my cursor shelter. There’s a genre of meetings at many companies which is done remotely and all inside of a shared Google Doc. Participants jump on a video conference call and also all open the same document. They may all collaboratively edit it in real time to take notes, or that may be one person’s job for the call. Sometimes this is the right tool for the job; other times I find the document needlessly distracting from the interactions that are the reason for the meeting itself. It virtually guarantees that there will be almost no satisfyingly met glances on the video feed - all eyes are often locked in to the doc view and that makes it feel way less human. And I often prefer to take notes on paper. My feeling is mixed on this practice.
But I caught a great idea Andy Lindeman tweeted recently, with credit to the person from whom he learned it. A little nature preserve or oasis in the doc where people can rest their cursors while they’re not doing anything particular in the doc. This alleviates the awkward hovering over various passages in the notes, which can also create its own anxieties about what someone is about to bring up:
You’ll see a couple of other examples in the thread, too, for one:
Why you know BJ Leiderman’s name. With all of the coverage of the introduction of new theme music for NPR’s Morning Edition, I found myself reading a bunch about the composer of the original theme, BJ Leiderman. He’s a fascinating person, easy to appreciate as you read up on the work and personal experiences that have shaped him. I was particularly fascinated to find out why he gets such prominent reference throughout NPR broadcasts. I assumed he must be pretty important inside that organization. In an Adam Ragusea profile on Leiderman in Current from a few years ago, Ragusea explains that it was savvy negotiating that led to the ongoing mentions:
“But NPR gave Leiderman something that turned out to be much more valuable: the contractual guarantee of a permanent on-air credit.
Leiderman is, today, the only off-air creator who receives regular on-air credit from NPR. The network stopped reading all credits in 2013, including Leiderman’s, but just one letter from his lawyer restored his name to the air. According to Leiderman, an NPR employee called him and said, “Oh, we’re so sorry. There’s a lot of new people here, none of them were here back in the day.”
As Morning Edition grew to become the nation’s most popular morning radio program, the value of that credit skyrocketed.”
Having worked in organizations with a lot of turnover, I can imagine the waves of staffers who were just never told about the historic agreement. That paraphrased reply sounds so human and familiar. Institutions have a way of forgetting details like this with the passing of time, and need to be reminded occasionally.
Those are the bananas I found for you this week. You can hit “reply” to this email and it will go only to me. Thank you.
Banana harverster’s note: I enjoy this work more than almost anything else, but I find myself increasingly having to fight for the time to do it among my other commitments. If you want to support my efforts to sustain and grow this thing, particularly as I venture in to the even more time consuming but also rewarding world of audio, there are a couple of ways you can help:
You can buy me coffee (or “coffee”) at the value of your choice via Ko-fi, or help build out my recording and mastering arsenal by making a purchase from the place where I’m keeping track of needs, the Three Banana Thursday future gear list. I’m happy to offer a credit in text and/or audio to memorialize any coffee or gear contribution that would like to be memorialized, and I’ll also dymo tape your name on to any gear purchased on my behalf.