Ah yes… Green Onions.
A classic.
So I’m told.
You don’t agree?
Look it’s not my place to… I don’t think… Look I’m a total duffer when it comes to this sort of thing, I can barely carry a tune let alone play an instrument. I was briefly taught piano when I was younger because I was upper class and it was expected we tinkled ivories from time to time, but I had effectively forgotten the whole thing by the time I got to Oxford. I’m not a musical chap so my opinion isn’t really worth a small bag of soil at the end of the day but isn’t this… well, a bit dull?
Green Onions? Dull?
When I first began working in musical recording facilities, everything I heard was exotic. In my house, we had nothing but classical music, light operetta and the occasional rude sea shanty when my Great Uncle Oscar discovered the key to the wine cellar. So everything I heard was new and exciting and it was wonderful. And Green Onions seemed to be a group playing the same thing over and over again and then stopping. And then they’d start the next song and you’d think “Hello this is a bit different at least” but then that slightly different thing would get repetitive as well. I fully appreciate the fact that it was a hit with a great number of people but when one had recently been listening to Miles Davis and Elvis Presley and Little Richard, this was perhaps a mite… plodding.
This is interesting because you haven’t really expressed much in the way of a negative view about music before now.
Well… one can’t spend as much time as I have around the creation of modern music without establishing a viewpoint of some variety or other.
Did you ever express it in the studio itself?
Oh my goodness no. No that certainly wasn’t my place. Nobody wanted to hear what a simple cleaner has to say about musical innovation. I tried to keep my views very much to myself.
You do have a very expressive face.
Well, that’s probably my mother’s side of the family. She once weeded an entire vegetable patch just by frowning at it for as long it took her to remove her overcoat.
And you tend to sigh when you’re annoyed.
Do I? I had no idea.
Is it possible you were pulling faces and sighing during the course of the recording of Green Onions?
Well, that certainly wasn’t my intention.
It’s just that-
(sigh)
We’ll move on.
I think that’s for the best.
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