The other day I read that Booker’s got a brand new bag. So with a good-to-see-you-again grin, I picked up the pieces and revisited his last album, the Neil Young’d and DBT’d joint Potato Hole. Ah, good stuff.
After a spin, I thought it would make a fine jam-a-long soundtrack, only fitting as “Green Onions” was one of the first tunes I tried to figure out when my second-hand, knock-off Strat and Cry-Baby were shiny new teenage treasures.
Picking out a few of the licks, I wondered what a cover would sound like.
Copping the tone seemed easy enough. Neil’s never been a fleet-fingered picker. (But on this one, who’s who? The Drive By Truckers have always had some Southern Man grit about them, and the skinny is that Booker plays a mean-n-loose guitar too, though he usually saddles up to the B3 before the red light blinks.) After a few dozen experiments, I realized that the only thing Neil and I have in common is that we can’t help but sound like ourselves. (A quality I still prize in a musician, despite its application to Kenny G.)
With the new Hot Sauce Committee on the brain, I sliced up some beats from the Monkee’s and added some fuzzy leads, landing sonically in the mid 90’s back when Primal Scream tried to sound American and the Soup Dragons wrestled Kula Shaker for the alt-rock bronze.
Not such a bad place to hang on a summer’s day.
