Readers and listeners interested in learning more about the most important band in Stax history – Booker T. & the MGs – would be well advised to pursue the 1998 retrospective Time is Tight. Its three CDs present the band’s chart hits, famous cover and tribute versions, and live recordings, more or less thematically compiled across three CDs.

The third CD features live performances by different combinations of original and subsequent MGs, many from reunion and tribute concerts. “Gotta Serve Somebody” with drummer Anton Fig and “Lay Lady Lay” with Fig and guitarist G.E. Smith comes from the MGs’ gig as “house band” for Columbia Records’ 30th anniversary / Bob Dylan tribute concert (upon Dylan’s request) in ‘92. Fig later lambastes the extended live jam on “Time is Tight” that gives this set its title.

A live version of “Born Under a Bad Sign” recorded during Albert King’s legendary Fillmore West engagement with the classic MGs lineup (San Francisco, ’68) is more than raw and energetic, it’s raging, almost brutish. Neil Young fronts “(Sitting on) The Dock of the Bay” to close: As ol’ Neil blows harmonica instead of whistling Otis’ familiar sad yet cheerful tune, it strikes you what an incredibly odd choice he was to front this song, as his voice is about as opposite Redding’s as you’re likely to find. (The MGs served upon his request as Young’s band for several European and North American tours; disc three also includes the MGs’ previously unreleased instrumental version of “Dock of the Bay.”)

Best of all is the buried treasure “Hole in the Wall,” gutbucket piano funk that sounds like a lost Les McCann or even Horace Silver boogie production – written like so many Stax classics by Booker T., Steve Cropper and Al Jackson Jr., but recorded as the title track for the 1965 Stax album by the Packers (led by saxophonist Packy Axton, son of co-owner Estelle Axton and nephew of co-owner Jim Stewart, and founding member of the original Mar-Keys).

“Your Good Thing (Is About to End)”
Mable John
Originally released May 1966
#95 Pop, #6 R&B Single

Surprisingly (or perhaps typically) enough, Stay Out of the Kitchen doesn’t even include my favorite Mabel John song, her first Stax single and her biggest Stax hit (#6 R&B), “Your Good Thing (Is About to End).” 

Like so many other great songs in the Stax catalog, “Your Good Thing” was written about love and its loss by David Porter and Isaac Hayes. But unlike every other tune this hit-making duo composed for John, they wrote it “up high” so that she would have to strain like a fluttering caged bird against the upper limits of her vocal register, which kind of forces John to raise the power (volume) and intensity (tone) of her admonishments and moans.

The first version of “Your Good Thing” that I heard was while reviewing, believe it or not, Boz Scaggs’ solo album Come on Home, Scaggs’ take on some classic, some long-lost, R&B and soul records that inspired him to pursue his own career in music. Echoes of Lou Rawls’ version, which made it up to #3 R&B single in 1969, might be bouncing through the back hallways of your musical memory, too.

Mable John’s original was much more direct, clocking in as Stax singles typically did, around three minutes. Starkly cast against Hayes’ piano, shaded with blue moans from electric guitar, these are probably the best three minutes of John’s entire career. They bring out, predominantly through feeling more than through any sound or technique, everything that was great about Stax: A pained yet proud, familiar yet unique, blending of gospel, blues and country music and vocals into profoundly new, modern soul music. Man, would I have loved to have heard Ray Charles sing this song.

To this day, “Your Good Thing (Is About to End)” remains available only on a few “various artist” compilation anthologies and not on any Mabel John album, or at least none that I could find.

It seems to happen with the music of every decade. You’ll hear music from that time years later and think to yourself, “My gosh, why have I never heard this before? How could this record NOT have been a hit?”

(It’s no joke. You can prove it with its reverse: Buy yourself a representative “Top 40 Pop” anthology from the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s and give it a spin. At some point you’re certain to ball up your fists and try to cram them in your ears while screaming, “THIS was a HIT? What were you people THINKING?!”)

Stay Out of the Kitchen, a 25-song treasure trove of serious R&B recorded from 1966 - ‘68 by Mable John, is one of those great unheard ones. The oldest of nine (including brother Little Willie John), Mable John sang for Berry Gordy’s (pre-Motown) Tamla label and helped lead the Raelettes, female vocal support for Ray Charles, both before and after this two-year Stax gig. She was inducted into the Rhythm & Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1994.

Working in the McLemore Avenue studio with Isaac Hayes, Steve Cropper, Booker T., David Porter, Al Jackson, Jr. and others, John cooked up and laid down the rhythm AND the blues. This is no genteel mainstreamed pop-crossover R&B: This is thick and lowdown, grinding in a dark corner on a Saturday night, rhythm and blues. “I’m not really what you’d call a singer,” she once said. “I’m a storyteller. Like some people sing it, I tell it.”

I’d bet anything that Hayes, Jones, Cropper & Co. just loved to play like this. Listen to the unpolished edge on the guitar and snare drum help John’s voice rough up and tumble down “Catch that Man,” how she rides the beat in “Running Out,” or her slow burning blues moans in “Don’t Get Caught,” “Have Your Cake” and “Be Warm to Me.” “The Man’s Too Busy” stomps out Texas roadhouse blues, while “Ain’t Giving It Up” serves the blues straight up with the classic snarling “Mannish Boy” hook and opening line, “You’re selfish and conceited, but I love you…” (And it sure sounds like Donald Fagen & Walter Becker lifted the piano intro to Steely Dan’s “The Fez” from the piano intro to the exquisite “I Need Your Love So Bad.”)

When she sings “I’m A Big Girl Now,” there ain’t no doubt about it. It is hard to believe that Stay Out of the Kitchen was the first full-length album of Mable John solo material, and it wasn’t released until 1992.

Relating, the second half of this CD reissue, was Bell’s last album for Stax. It was a solid release about the subject upon which Bell did most of his best composing and singing: Romantic relationships.

Bell recorded Relating back at the Stax McLemore studio in Memphis, co-producing with Al Jackson, Jr., drummer for the MGs (”He and I had been friends since teenagers at high school,” Bell once explained). Jackson also played percussion - there’s no drummer credited so he must have played drums too - and his partner in the MGs rhythm machine, Duck Dunn, played bass.

Bell co-wrote almost every song on Relating with James McDuffie, keyboard player in the Stax studio band and in Bell’s touring band. Several vocal arrangements feature The Temprees, a Memphis vocal trio who released a Stax album of their own (Three) in 1975; their harmonies work best with Bell on “You Don’t Want a Man,” a countrified bluesy shout that you can easily imagine rendered in Otis Redding’s rough-hewn voice.

Stax released three singles from Relating, none of which did too much damage: “Lovin’ on Borrowed Time” (#22 R&B) is another tune that shows Redding’s influence; and “Getting What You Want (Losing What You Got)” (#39 R&B), builds its homespun lyric from common expressions, paired with simple music tart with country, gospel and soul flavors. A sign of the times, “I’ve Got to Go On Without You” shows the influence of Hi Records, “the other Memphis label” (where Jackson and other Stax studio musicians often freelanced) that had struck ’70s chart gold with Al Green. Bell even visits his falsetto voice in phrases, just like Green would too.

“I’ve Got to Go On Without You” was picked up by Shirley Brown for her classic Stax Woman to Woman album.