BOOKER T. & THE M.G.'s: UNION EXTENDED (1976)
1) Overton Park Sunrise; 2)
Steve's Stroll; 3) Duck Walk; 4) Cotton Carnival; 5) Midnight On McLemore; 6)
Union Extended; 7) Avalon; 8) Around Orange Mound; 9) National Jackson; 10)
Beale Street Revival; 11) Saucy Pt. 2; 12) Booker's Theme.
Only nine days after Booker T. and the M.G.'s
finally came together and agreed to give their romance one more chance, Al
Jackson Jr. was murdered in his own home. Plans for a new album were
temporarily scratched, but relationships between Booker T. and the remaining
members of the band were somewhat remedied, and, as tribute to the dear
departed, Stax put out this record of previously unreleased archive material — with
a title that was thrice misleading: not
only did Union Extended contain no
new recordings, but it wasn't even prophetic, since the extended union only
lasted for less than two years, and
the union had nothing to do with Stax.
Nevertheless, this here is a fine enough
gathering of leftovers. It has never been issued on CD and is rather hard to
come by in physical form these days, and the exact dates for the recordings are
unknown, but judging by the overall stylistics and instrumentation, I'd
probably put them around 1968-70. All the tracks are original instrumental compositions
by the M.G.'s and are no better and no worse than their regular stuff — and
commenting on them individually, for that reason, is tremendously hard, but
here goes a feeble attempt.
ʽOverton Park Sunriseʼ is a fairly good title,
since Jones and Cropper's playing on the track sounds «fresh», particularly
Jones' «water-droplet» organ tone that sometimes throws on the hook from
ʽSunnyʼ and Cropper's sunshine-poppy guitar riff — a dang good song to start
off your day with if you're in need of a quick, painless shot of optimism.
ʽCotton Carnivalʼ begins by sounding like ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ transposed to
a major tonality, then, all of a sudden, shifts half of its riff to a quotation
from ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ in the coda section — funny, and easy to miss, but
it's there all right. ʽMidnight On McLemoreʼ may have been written and/or
recorded around midnight in the studio, of course, but its musical skeleton is
essentially a variation on ʽSummertimeʼ — then again, ʽSummertimeʼ has always
had a nocturnal aura around it. Anyway, some nice, quietly haunting organ and
guitar themes again.
The most haunting track, though, is arguably
placed at the very end, where ʽBooker's Themeʼ, opening with the sound of sea
waves and a romantic piano motif, quickly gets a string arrangement and
becomes the perfect soundtrack for one of those ride-across-the-country,
freedom-wind hippie movies of the late Sixties. Since the band almost never
used the orchestra on its original tracks, this could have been a later
overdub, but it works — in fact, it works in perfect contrast with the opening
number: ʽOverton Park Sunriseʼ opened the day for us, and ʽBooker's Themeʼ is
the ideal sundown-at-the-beach track, closing the day. Whoever assembled this
stuff at Stax sure had a knack for conceptuality.
Anyway, a solid thumbs up here: it is certainly
telling that an album of outtakes released in 1976 would be more satisfactory
than the band's contemporary output — if anything, playing Union Extended in its little time machine pod back-to-back with the
modernized Universal Language gives
an ample demonstration of how much the ideology had changed in about six or
seven years' time. Not for the better, of course — you knew I'd say that,
didn't you?
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