Chords for Steve Cropper - The AMAZING Story Behind "Green Onions"
Tempo:
84 bpm
Chords used:
D
Am
Tuning:Standard Tuning (EADGBE)Capo:+0fret
Start Jamming...
Hi, this is Joe Chambers.
Today's short clip from the vault comes from the Steve Cropper interview we shot back in 2008.
Steve talks about how they recorded the great instrumental hit song, Green Onions.
We hope you enjoy it, and if you do, be sure to hit like, subscribe, and the notification bell
so you don't miss any of our new content.
Hope you like it.
Steve Cropper.
Story behind Green Onions, Jim Stewart had booked a Sunday session, which was more of a demo,
because we worked five days a week, Monday through Friday,
and all the guys, most of the guys except for myself, had night gigs.
They had to be on stage by 9 o'clock usually, and doing four sets a night, sometimes five.
Anyway, we were there to cut an artist named Billy Lee Riley, who's pretty famous.
You may have him hanging on the wall around here somewhere.
Jim had talked to Billy about cutting some stuff on him.
I think Billy had recorded over at Sun or somewhere.
Anyway, he didn't show up for the session, and we were just kind of waiting on him,
and we were just jamming on some stuff.
Jim still expected Billy to show up.
We just started jamming on some blues just to kind of warm up our instruments
and just kind of keep from being bored to death.
We're sitting there waiting on this guy.
Usually it's the other way around.
Usually the singer's waiting on the musician to show up.
But that day, we were just playing and just jamming on some blues,
just some blues and F that we would do on stage just to mark the time, to just add to the night.
We finished it, and I remember if I still had the tape, I remember the end.
We just were laughing.
We just thought it was funny.
That's pretty good, da-da-da-da-da.
Jim got on the talk back and said, Hey, guys, come up here and listen to this.
We go, What?
You put that down?
He said, Yeah.
He was already set up to record, so he just reached over and pushed the record button.
So there we were listening to this thing, and Jim Stewart just fell in love with it.
He thought it was great.
It was a song that turned out to be the B-side of Green Onions called Behave Yourself.
At the time, it didn't have a title.
But what was funny about it is Jim Stewart said, That's pretty good.
He said, If we decide to put that out, if you guys got another song you can put on the B-side.
He called it the B-side.
We said, No.
We looked at each other.
We didn't sit around and write all the time.
Booker and I wrote a little bit.
I looked at Booker and said, I don't know.
I said, I remember you played me some kind of riff or lick about two weeks prior to that session.
He said, I don't know.
He said, Well, I think I might remember.
He goes out on the organ and he starts playing the Green Onions lick that we know.
I said, Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
Al sat down and Louis sat down on the bass.
We started jamming on this thing.
Jim said, That's pretty catchy.
He said, Let's get an arrangement on this.
We did this thing.
Jim said, That's pretty good.
He said, Steve, that thing you're doing in the middle of the song,
why don't you put that on the intro?
Just do that on the intro and play a verse like that.
Then let Booker play and then you do a regular solo.
I went, Oh, okay.
That was the take.
I put these chank things I was doing on the intro.
Booker plays two verses.
I played a solo.
Booker played a verse.
That was it.
It was out.
It was just sort of an accident in a way.
The good part of this story, I love telling this part of the story.
I went ahead and leaded it off.
I called Scotty Moore the next day.
For people who don't know Scotty Moore, I'm sure you do if you're watching this stuff.
He was Elvis' guitar player.
He was also a guitar player for Sun Records, and he also liked to engineer.
He used to call me over to do some sessions because he wanted to engineer like Chip's Moma did.
I was this lucky guy that got to play on some of these sessions.
Anyway, I called Scotty and I said, Yesterday I said, I think we cut a pretty good song.
I said, Would you cut me a dub on it?
He said, Sure, come on over.
I went over there and we fired up.
He fires a lathe up and all that.
He said, Man, Steve, that's pretty catchy.
He said, What do you call that?
I said, We don't have a name for it yet.
I said, I just know it's good.
I said, I'm going to see if I can get my buddy to it.
I want one of my disc jockey friends to hear it.
So he cuts this dub.
The next morning I go down to my friend Ruben Warsham who was on WLOK Radio Station.
He had the drive time slot.
I went down there, and I used to go down there and just hang out with him anyway.
We were kind of good friends.
He'd come by the record shop and we'd hang out some.
I said, I want you to listen to this thing.
I said, We cut it Sunday afternoon.
Tell me what you think.
So he put it on the turntable.
He was playing another record on the air.
He put it on the turntable and he played the intro.
He played about two or three bars of the verse.
He just stopped it and backed it up.
The other record got through playing.
He just hit it and spun it and put it out on the air.
I saw the red light come on in that turntable.
I said, Is that going out on the air?
He said, Yeah.
I said, Man, that's okay.
I said, You haven't even heard it yet.
He said, No, it's good enough.
He hears it, backs it up and plays it again.
He played it four times in a row, and the phones lit up.
People couldn't believe it.
They said, Who is that?
Where can we buy this?
What do you call that?
Da-da-da-da-da.
He said, I can't tell you, and there's no name for it.
Anyway, we got through, and he's laughing about it and all that.
He said, Man, you better tell the guys to get serious about that.
I went back to the record shop, and they said, What did you do?
I said, What?
They said, The phones are ringing off the wall.
Everybody's wanting to buy this thing that you had them playing on the radio.
We were listening.
I said, You've got to be kidding.
We called Jim Stewart.
He was still working at the bank.
He worked in the trust department at the bank downtown.
We told him, Jim, on your lunch break, you better get by the studio because we've got something going on here.
We told him all about it, and he said, We've got to do something.
It wasn't the side he liked.
It was the up-tempo side.
We called the guys in and said, We've got to get a name for this thing, get it on the label and so forth.
I can tell you now that Louis Steinberger played bass on it.
When we were hashing around ideas, we came up with all kinds of crazy ideas.
He said, Why don't you call it Onions?
He said, Because that's the stinkiest music I ever heard.
I went, That's pretty good, but Onions is kind of a negative.
I don't deal in negatives.
I said, Isn't Onions a little negative?
It makes people's eyes burn.
Some people don't like them.
It gives them indigestion and all that.
I said, What about Green Onions?
I said, A lot of people eat green onions with dinner and everything like that.
They went, Yeah, Green Onions.
That was the title.
I think the other title came about when, on the flip side of the song I mentioned earlier, Behave Yourself,
which was just a blues ballad thing, Al Jackson actually said on the session,
I'll behave yourself, like that.
That's where that came from.
There we had the record.
It came out, it was Vote 102.
It was the second release on Vote Records.
The thing, I jumped in the car on that Friday.
That afternoon I went down and put it in the vat.
We made the stampers up.
We had the title and all that.
We had that all printed up, put the stampers on it.
I put it in the vat that night.
That was a Tuesday evening.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday I went down and I picked up a box of 25 records
and got with my buddy Bill Biggs, who was a promotion guy that hit all the one-stops
and the jukebox operators and stuff.
I said, Can I tag along and we can go hit some of these stations?
He just thought that was a great idea.
I jumped in the car with him with a box of records, and we started hitting Tupelo
and Jackson, Mississippi and went over to Four City, Arkansas
and all the way to Little Rock and hit all these things.
All of a sudden, they all started playing this record.
They were just glad to see anybody.
They said, This is great.
Nobody ever comes to see us in these little towns.
We got this saturated play on one weekend, and the calls came in like crazy
because it really was a good record.
Atlantic finally got wind of it, and they said, You guys have a hit.
One thing's wrong.
You're going to have to get it off a Volt label
because we don't need to be promoting another label.
So we put it on stacks and went down.
We changed the stampers and got records the next week.
It went to number one.
[D] [Am] [D] [N]
Today's short clip from the vault comes from the Steve Cropper interview we shot back in 2008.
Steve talks about how they recorded the great instrumental hit song, Green Onions.
We hope you enjoy it, and if you do, be sure to hit like, subscribe, and the notification bell
so you don't miss any of our new content.
Hope you like it.
Steve Cropper.
Story behind Green Onions, Jim Stewart had booked a Sunday session, which was more of a demo,
because we worked five days a week, Monday through Friday,
and all the guys, most of the guys except for myself, had night gigs.
They had to be on stage by 9 o'clock usually, and doing four sets a night, sometimes five.
Anyway, we were there to cut an artist named Billy Lee Riley, who's pretty famous.
You may have him hanging on the wall around here somewhere.
Jim had talked to Billy about cutting some stuff on him.
I think Billy had recorded over at Sun or somewhere.
Anyway, he didn't show up for the session, and we were just kind of waiting on him,
and we were just jamming on some stuff.
Jim still expected Billy to show up.
We just started jamming on some blues just to kind of warm up our instruments
and just kind of keep from being bored to death.
We're sitting there waiting on this guy.
Usually it's the other way around.
Usually the singer's waiting on the musician to show up.
But that day, we were just playing and just jamming on some blues,
just some blues and F that we would do on stage just to mark the time, to just add to the night.
We finished it, and I remember if I still had the tape, I remember the end.
We just were laughing.
We just thought it was funny.
That's pretty good, da-da-da-da-da.
Jim got on the talk back and said, Hey, guys, come up here and listen to this.
We go, What?
You put that down?
He said, Yeah.
He was already set up to record, so he just reached over and pushed the record button.
So there we were listening to this thing, and Jim Stewart just fell in love with it.
He thought it was great.
It was a song that turned out to be the B-side of Green Onions called Behave Yourself.
At the time, it didn't have a title.
But what was funny about it is Jim Stewart said, That's pretty good.
He said, If we decide to put that out, if you guys got another song you can put on the B-side.
He called it the B-side.
We said, No.
We looked at each other.
We didn't sit around and write all the time.
Booker and I wrote a little bit.
I looked at Booker and said, I don't know.
I said, I remember you played me some kind of riff or lick about two weeks prior to that session.
He said, I don't know.
He said, Well, I think I might remember.
He goes out on the organ and he starts playing the Green Onions lick that we know.
I said, Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
Al sat down and Louis sat down on the bass.
We started jamming on this thing.
Jim said, That's pretty catchy.
He said, Let's get an arrangement on this.
We did this thing.
Jim said, That's pretty good.
He said, Steve, that thing you're doing in the middle of the song,
why don't you put that on the intro?
Just do that on the intro and play a verse like that.
Then let Booker play and then you do a regular solo.
I went, Oh, okay.
That was the take.
I put these chank things I was doing on the intro.
Booker plays two verses.
I played a solo.
Booker played a verse.
That was it.
It was out.
It was just sort of an accident in a way.
The good part of this story, I love telling this part of the story.
I went ahead and leaded it off.
I called Scotty Moore the next day.
For people who don't know Scotty Moore, I'm sure you do if you're watching this stuff.
He was Elvis' guitar player.
He was also a guitar player for Sun Records, and he also liked to engineer.
He used to call me over to do some sessions because he wanted to engineer like Chip's Moma did.
I was this lucky guy that got to play on some of these sessions.
Anyway, I called Scotty and I said, Yesterday I said, I think we cut a pretty good song.
I said, Would you cut me a dub on it?
He said, Sure, come on over.
I went over there and we fired up.
He fires a lathe up and all that.
He said, Man, Steve, that's pretty catchy.
He said, What do you call that?
I said, We don't have a name for it yet.
I said, I just know it's good.
I said, I'm going to see if I can get my buddy to it.
I want one of my disc jockey friends to hear it.
So he cuts this dub.
The next morning I go down to my friend Ruben Warsham who was on WLOK Radio Station.
He had the drive time slot.
I went down there, and I used to go down there and just hang out with him anyway.
We were kind of good friends.
He'd come by the record shop and we'd hang out some.
I said, I want you to listen to this thing.
I said, We cut it Sunday afternoon.
Tell me what you think.
So he put it on the turntable.
He was playing another record on the air.
He put it on the turntable and he played the intro.
He played about two or three bars of the verse.
He just stopped it and backed it up.
The other record got through playing.
He just hit it and spun it and put it out on the air.
I saw the red light come on in that turntable.
I said, Is that going out on the air?
He said, Yeah.
I said, Man, that's okay.
I said, You haven't even heard it yet.
He said, No, it's good enough.
He hears it, backs it up and plays it again.
He played it four times in a row, and the phones lit up.
People couldn't believe it.
They said, Who is that?
Where can we buy this?
What do you call that?
Da-da-da-da-da.
He said, I can't tell you, and there's no name for it.
Anyway, we got through, and he's laughing about it and all that.
He said, Man, you better tell the guys to get serious about that.
I went back to the record shop, and they said, What did you do?
I said, What?
They said, The phones are ringing off the wall.
Everybody's wanting to buy this thing that you had them playing on the radio.
We were listening.
I said, You've got to be kidding.
We called Jim Stewart.
He was still working at the bank.
He worked in the trust department at the bank downtown.
We told him, Jim, on your lunch break, you better get by the studio because we've got something going on here.
We told him all about it, and he said, We've got to do something.
It wasn't the side he liked.
It was the up-tempo side.
We called the guys in and said, We've got to get a name for this thing, get it on the label and so forth.
I can tell you now that Louis Steinberger played bass on it.
When we were hashing around ideas, we came up with all kinds of crazy ideas.
He said, Why don't you call it Onions?
He said, Because that's the stinkiest music I ever heard.
I went, That's pretty good, but Onions is kind of a negative.
I don't deal in negatives.
I said, Isn't Onions a little negative?
It makes people's eyes burn.
Some people don't like them.
It gives them indigestion and all that.
I said, What about Green Onions?
I said, A lot of people eat green onions with dinner and everything like that.
They went, Yeah, Green Onions.
That was the title.
I think the other title came about when, on the flip side of the song I mentioned earlier, Behave Yourself,
which was just a blues ballad thing, Al Jackson actually said on the session,
I'll behave yourself, like that.
That's where that came from.
There we had the record.
It came out, it was Vote 102.
It was the second release on Vote Records.
The thing, I jumped in the car on that Friday.
That afternoon I went down and put it in the vat.
We made the stampers up.
We had the title and all that.
We had that all printed up, put the stampers on it.
I put it in the vat that night.
That was a Tuesday evening.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday I went down and I picked up a box of 25 records
and got with my buddy Bill Biggs, who was a promotion guy that hit all the one-stops
and the jukebox operators and stuff.
I said, Can I tag along and we can go hit some of these stations?
He just thought that was a great idea.
I jumped in the car with him with a box of records, and we started hitting Tupelo
and Jackson, Mississippi and went over to Four City, Arkansas
and all the way to Little Rock and hit all these things.
All of a sudden, they all started playing this record.
They were just glad to see anybody.
They said, This is great.
Nobody ever comes to see us in these little towns.
We got this saturated play on one weekend, and the calls came in like crazy
because it really was a good record.
Atlantic finally got wind of it, and they said, You guys have a hit.
One thing's wrong.
You're going to have to get it off a Volt label
because we don't need to be promoting another label.
So we put it on stacks and went down.
We changed the stampers and got records the next week.
It went to number one.
[D] [Am] [D] [N]
Key:
D
Am
D
Am
D
Am
D
Am
Hi, this is Joe Chambers.
Today's short clip from the vault comes from the Steve Cropper interview we shot back in 2008.
Steve talks about how they recorded the great instrumental hit song, Green Onions.
We hope you enjoy it, and if you do, be sure to hit like, subscribe, and the notification bell
so you don't miss any of our new content.
Hope you like it.
Steve Cropper.
Story behind Green Onions, Jim Stewart had booked a Sunday session, which was more of a demo,
because we worked five days a week, Monday through Friday,
and all the guys, most of the guys except for myself, had night gigs.
They had to be on stage by 9 o'clock usually, and doing four sets a night, sometimes five.
_ Anyway, we were there to cut an artist named Billy Lee Riley, who's pretty famous.
You may have him hanging on the wall around here somewhere. _
Jim had talked to Billy about cutting some stuff on him.
I think Billy had recorded over at Sun or somewhere. _
Anyway, he didn't show up for the session, and we were just kind of waiting on him,
and we were just jamming on some stuff.
Jim still expected Billy to show up.
_ We just started jamming on some blues just to kind of warm up our instruments
and just kind of keep from being bored to death.
We're sitting there waiting on this guy.
Usually it's the other way around.
Usually the singer's waiting on the musician to show up.
But that day, we were just playing and just jamming on some blues,
just some blues and F that we would do on stage just to mark the time, to just add to the night. _
_ We finished it, and I remember if I still had the tape, I remember the end.
We just were laughing.
We just thought it was funny.
That's pretty good, da-da-da-da-da.
Jim got on the talk back and said, Hey, guys, come up here and listen to this.
We go, What?
You put that down?
He said, Yeah.
He was already set up to record, so he just reached over and pushed the record button.
So there we were listening to this thing, and Jim Stewart just fell in love with it.
He thought it was great.
It was a song that turned out to _ be the B-side of Green Onions called Behave Yourself.
At the time, it didn't have a title.
But what was funny about it is Jim Stewart said, That's pretty good.
He said, If we decide to put that out, if you guys got another song you can put on the B-side.
He called it the B-side.
We said, No.
We looked at each other.
We didn't sit around and write all the time.
Booker and I wrote a little bit.
I looked at Booker and said, I don't know.
I said, I remember you played me some kind of riff or lick about two weeks prior to that session.
_ He said, I don't know.
He said, Well, I think I might remember.
He goes out on the organ and he starts playing the Green Onions lick that we know.
I said, Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
Al sat down and Louis sat down on the bass.
We started jamming on this thing.
Jim said, That's pretty catchy.
He said, Let's get an arrangement on this.
We did this thing.
Jim said, That's pretty good.
He said, Steve, that thing you're doing in the middle of the song,
why don't you put that on the intro?
Just do that on the intro and play a verse like that.
Then let Booker play and then you do a regular solo.
I went, Oh, okay.
That was the take.
I put these chank things I was doing on the intro.
Booker plays two verses.
I played a solo.
Booker played a verse.
That was it.
It was out.
It was just sort of an accident in a way.
_ _ _ The good part of this story, I love telling this part of the story.
_ I went ahead and leaded it off.
I called Scotty Moore the next day.
For people who don't know Scotty Moore, I'm sure you do if you're watching this stuff.
He was Elvis' guitar player.
He was also a guitar player for Sun Records, and he also liked to engineer.
He used to call me over to do some sessions because he wanted to engineer like Chip's Moma did.
I was this lucky guy that got to play on some of these sessions.
Anyway, I called Scotty and I said, Yesterday I said, I think we cut a pretty good song.
I said, Would you cut me a dub on it?
He said, Sure, come on over.
I went over there and we fired up.
He fires a lathe up and all that.
He said, Man, Steve, that's pretty catchy.
He said, What do you call that?
I said, We don't have a name for it yet.
I said, I just know it's good.
_ I said, I'm going to see if I can get my buddy to it.
I want one of my disc jockey friends to hear it.
So he cuts this dub.
The next morning I go down to my friend Ruben Warsham who was on _ WLOK Radio Station.
He had the drive time slot.
I went down there, and I used to go down there and just hang out with him anyway.
We were kind of good friends.
He'd come by the record shop and we'd hang out some.
I said, I want you to listen to this thing.
I said, We cut it Sunday afternoon.
Tell me what you think.
So he put it on the turntable.
He was playing another record on the air.
He put it on the turntable and he played the intro.
He played about two or three bars of the verse.
He just stopped it and backed it up.
The other record got through playing.
He just hit it and spun it and put it out on the air.
I saw the red light come on in that turntable.
I said, Is that going out on the air?
He said, Yeah.
I said, Man, that's okay.
I said, You haven't even heard it yet.
He said, No, it's good enough.
He hears it, backs it up and plays it again.
He played it four times in a row, and the phones lit up.
People couldn't believe it.
They said, Who is that?
Where can we buy this?
What do you call that?
Da-da-da-da-da.
He said, I can't tell you, and there's no name for it.
_ Anyway, we got through, and he's laughing about it and all that.
He said, Man, you better tell the guys to get serious about that.
I went back to the record shop, and they said, What did you do?
I said, What?
They said, The phones are ringing off the wall.
Everybody's wanting to buy this thing that you had them playing on the radio.
We were listening.
I said, You've got to be kidding.
We called Jim Stewart.
He was still working at the bank.
He worked in the trust department at the bank downtown.
We told him, Jim, on your lunch break, you better get by the studio because we've got something going on here.
_ _ We told him all about it, and he said, We've got to do something.
It wasn't the side he liked.
It was the up-tempo side.
We called the guys in and said, We've got to get a name for this thing, get it on the label and so forth.
I can tell you now that Louis Steinberger played bass on it.
When we were hashing around ideas, we came up with all kinds of crazy ideas.
He said, Why don't you call it Onions?
He said, Because that's the stinkiest music I ever heard.
I went, That's pretty good, but Onions is kind of a negative.
I don't deal in negatives.
I said, Isn't Onions a little negative?
It makes people's eyes burn.
Some people don't like them.
It gives them indigestion and all that.
I said, What about Green Onions?
I said, A lot of people eat green onions with dinner and everything like that.
They went, Yeah, Green Onions.
That was the title. _
I think the other title came about when, on the flip side of the song I mentioned earlier, Behave Yourself,
which was just a blues ballad thing, Al Jackson actually said on the session,
I'll behave yourself, like that.
That's where that came from.
There we had the record.
It came out, it was Vote 102.
It was the second release on Vote Records. _ _
The thing, I jumped in the car on that Friday.
That afternoon I went down and put it in the vat.
We made the stampers up.
We had the title and all that.
We had that all printed up, put the stampers on it.
I put it in the vat that night.
That was a Tuesday evening.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday I went down and I picked up a box of 25 records
and got with my buddy Bill Biggs, who was a promotion guy that hit all the one-stops
and the jukebox operators and stuff.
I said, Can I tag along and we can go hit some of these stations?
He just thought that was a great idea.
I jumped in the car with him with a box of records, and we started hitting Tupelo
and Jackson, Mississippi and went over to Four City, Arkansas
and all the way to Little Rock and hit all these things.
All of a sudden, they all started playing this record.
They were just glad to see anybody.
They said, This is great.
Nobody ever comes to see us in these little towns.
We got this saturated play on one weekend, and the calls came in like crazy
because it really was a good record.
Atlantic finally got wind of it, and they said, You guys have a hit.
One thing's wrong.
You're going to have to get it off a Volt label
because we don't need to be promoting another label.
So we put it on stacks and went down.
We changed the stampers and got records the next week.
It went to number one.
_ _ _ [D] _ _ _ _ [Am] _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ [N] _ _
Today's short clip from the vault comes from the Steve Cropper interview we shot back in 2008.
Steve talks about how they recorded the great instrumental hit song, Green Onions.
We hope you enjoy it, and if you do, be sure to hit like, subscribe, and the notification bell
so you don't miss any of our new content.
Hope you like it.
Steve Cropper.
Story behind Green Onions, Jim Stewart had booked a Sunday session, which was more of a demo,
because we worked five days a week, Monday through Friday,
and all the guys, most of the guys except for myself, had night gigs.
They had to be on stage by 9 o'clock usually, and doing four sets a night, sometimes five.
_ Anyway, we were there to cut an artist named Billy Lee Riley, who's pretty famous.
You may have him hanging on the wall around here somewhere. _
Jim had talked to Billy about cutting some stuff on him.
I think Billy had recorded over at Sun or somewhere. _
Anyway, he didn't show up for the session, and we were just kind of waiting on him,
and we were just jamming on some stuff.
Jim still expected Billy to show up.
_ We just started jamming on some blues just to kind of warm up our instruments
and just kind of keep from being bored to death.
We're sitting there waiting on this guy.
Usually it's the other way around.
Usually the singer's waiting on the musician to show up.
But that day, we were just playing and just jamming on some blues,
just some blues and F that we would do on stage just to mark the time, to just add to the night. _
_ We finished it, and I remember if I still had the tape, I remember the end.
We just were laughing.
We just thought it was funny.
That's pretty good, da-da-da-da-da.
Jim got on the talk back and said, Hey, guys, come up here and listen to this.
We go, What?
You put that down?
He said, Yeah.
He was already set up to record, so he just reached over and pushed the record button.
So there we were listening to this thing, and Jim Stewart just fell in love with it.
He thought it was great.
It was a song that turned out to _ be the B-side of Green Onions called Behave Yourself.
At the time, it didn't have a title.
But what was funny about it is Jim Stewart said, That's pretty good.
He said, If we decide to put that out, if you guys got another song you can put on the B-side.
He called it the B-side.
We said, No.
We looked at each other.
We didn't sit around and write all the time.
Booker and I wrote a little bit.
I looked at Booker and said, I don't know.
I said, I remember you played me some kind of riff or lick about two weeks prior to that session.
_ He said, I don't know.
He said, Well, I think I might remember.
He goes out on the organ and he starts playing the Green Onions lick that we know.
I said, Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
Al sat down and Louis sat down on the bass.
We started jamming on this thing.
Jim said, That's pretty catchy.
He said, Let's get an arrangement on this.
We did this thing.
Jim said, That's pretty good.
He said, Steve, that thing you're doing in the middle of the song,
why don't you put that on the intro?
Just do that on the intro and play a verse like that.
Then let Booker play and then you do a regular solo.
I went, Oh, okay.
That was the take.
I put these chank things I was doing on the intro.
Booker plays two verses.
I played a solo.
Booker played a verse.
That was it.
It was out.
It was just sort of an accident in a way.
_ _ _ The good part of this story, I love telling this part of the story.
_ I went ahead and leaded it off.
I called Scotty Moore the next day.
For people who don't know Scotty Moore, I'm sure you do if you're watching this stuff.
He was Elvis' guitar player.
He was also a guitar player for Sun Records, and he also liked to engineer.
He used to call me over to do some sessions because he wanted to engineer like Chip's Moma did.
I was this lucky guy that got to play on some of these sessions.
Anyway, I called Scotty and I said, Yesterday I said, I think we cut a pretty good song.
I said, Would you cut me a dub on it?
He said, Sure, come on over.
I went over there and we fired up.
He fires a lathe up and all that.
He said, Man, Steve, that's pretty catchy.
He said, What do you call that?
I said, We don't have a name for it yet.
I said, I just know it's good.
_ I said, I'm going to see if I can get my buddy to it.
I want one of my disc jockey friends to hear it.
So he cuts this dub.
The next morning I go down to my friend Ruben Warsham who was on _ WLOK Radio Station.
He had the drive time slot.
I went down there, and I used to go down there and just hang out with him anyway.
We were kind of good friends.
He'd come by the record shop and we'd hang out some.
I said, I want you to listen to this thing.
I said, We cut it Sunday afternoon.
Tell me what you think.
So he put it on the turntable.
He was playing another record on the air.
He put it on the turntable and he played the intro.
He played about two or three bars of the verse.
He just stopped it and backed it up.
The other record got through playing.
He just hit it and spun it and put it out on the air.
I saw the red light come on in that turntable.
I said, Is that going out on the air?
He said, Yeah.
I said, Man, that's okay.
I said, You haven't even heard it yet.
He said, No, it's good enough.
He hears it, backs it up and plays it again.
He played it four times in a row, and the phones lit up.
People couldn't believe it.
They said, Who is that?
Where can we buy this?
What do you call that?
Da-da-da-da-da.
He said, I can't tell you, and there's no name for it.
_ Anyway, we got through, and he's laughing about it and all that.
He said, Man, you better tell the guys to get serious about that.
I went back to the record shop, and they said, What did you do?
I said, What?
They said, The phones are ringing off the wall.
Everybody's wanting to buy this thing that you had them playing on the radio.
We were listening.
I said, You've got to be kidding.
We called Jim Stewart.
He was still working at the bank.
He worked in the trust department at the bank downtown.
We told him, Jim, on your lunch break, you better get by the studio because we've got something going on here.
_ _ We told him all about it, and he said, We've got to do something.
It wasn't the side he liked.
It was the up-tempo side.
We called the guys in and said, We've got to get a name for this thing, get it on the label and so forth.
I can tell you now that Louis Steinberger played bass on it.
When we were hashing around ideas, we came up with all kinds of crazy ideas.
He said, Why don't you call it Onions?
He said, Because that's the stinkiest music I ever heard.
I went, That's pretty good, but Onions is kind of a negative.
I don't deal in negatives.
I said, Isn't Onions a little negative?
It makes people's eyes burn.
Some people don't like them.
It gives them indigestion and all that.
I said, What about Green Onions?
I said, A lot of people eat green onions with dinner and everything like that.
They went, Yeah, Green Onions.
That was the title. _
I think the other title came about when, on the flip side of the song I mentioned earlier, Behave Yourself,
which was just a blues ballad thing, Al Jackson actually said on the session,
I'll behave yourself, like that.
That's where that came from.
There we had the record.
It came out, it was Vote 102.
It was the second release on Vote Records. _ _
The thing, I jumped in the car on that Friday.
That afternoon I went down and put it in the vat.
We made the stampers up.
We had the title and all that.
We had that all printed up, put the stampers on it.
I put it in the vat that night.
That was a Tuesday evening.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday I went down and I picked up a box of 25 records
and got with my buddy Bill Biggs, who was a promotion guy that hit all the one-stops
and the jukebox operators and stuff.
I said, Can I tag along and we can go hit some of these stations?
He just thought that was a great idea.
I jumped in the car with him with a box of records, and we started hitting Tupelo
and Jackson, Mississippi and went over to Four City, Arkansas
and all the way to Little Rock and hit all these things.
All of a sudden, they all started playing this record.
They were just glad to see anybody.
They said, This is great.
Nobody ever comes to see us in these little towns.
We got this saturated play on one weekend, and the calls came in like crazy
because it really was a good record.
Atlantic finally got wind of it, and they said, You guys have a hit.
One thing's wrong.
You're going to have to get it off a Volt label
because we don't need to be promoting another label.
So we put it on stacks and went down.
We changed the stampers and got records the next week.
It went to number one.
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