#0032: Booker T & The MGs - Green Onions [***]

1991.  Or thereabouts.  There was a club just off Mumbles Pier in Swansea called Cinderella's.  When the students and other quasi-miscreants such as myself and my group of friends were done drinking in the Uplands and/or the Mumbles Mile, we'd head for Cinderella's.  A giant laminate dance floor in the middle of a massive club slowly became filled with increasingly wasted people.  The DJ played everything from rock to disco and we lurched from one foot to another, trying to make awkward small talk with any female unfortunate enough find themselves facing us while we nursed our pints of mega diesel.

Mega diesel was Diesel 2.0.  Diesel 1.0 was Snakebite and black, whereas mega diesel was half a pint of Stella with a bottle of Strongbow 1080 thrown in with the obligatory blackcurrant cordial.  Mega diesel was the reason the carpeted areas of Cinders had a distinct purple tinge.  Spillage or spoutage, it really didn't matter.  The end result was the same.  Conversations like this took place the following day.

"Oh man, I got so drunk last night.  I snogged this girl.  All I could taste were her braces."
"You snogged a lamppost, dude."

Herds of people wound up walking the whole 5 miles back to Swansea cuz the Oystermouth cab rank was overrun.

The first time I heard Green Onions, I was on that dance floor with my mates.  The song started and the already crowded floor became an enormous mosh pit.  But it wasn't the kind of thrashing, swirling, jumping and gobbing pits I've seen at various gigs.  This was slow and intimate.  Everybody was hunched up with their elbows tucked in making half fists as they gently bumped into one another, rubbing shoulders in time to the groove.  It was incredible.  I will never forget it.

That's the opening track.  So for me, it's kinda done then.  It's impossible to follow a tune of that significance so poor old Booker T is on a hiding to nothing here.  The other tunes are good but much like Jimmy Smith, it's background stuff.  It's all pretty much in the same ballpark of sound but they nailed it on the first track.  The rest is just a long walk home.