Booker

Booker T and his band at Joe's Pub last night, promoting his new album, Potato Hole, which he recorded with members of The Drive By Truckers.

"You hear the words?" Booker T asked the crowd after one of the loudest seven or so minutes of instrumental, organ infused rock the area around Astor place has ever experienced. Every song Booker T plays has a story to it; it's in the title and the music and if you can't exactly hear any words, that's OK, that unmistakable sound will get you by.

When the band swelled into Booker T's classic Green Onions--three songs into the set--he introduced it humbly by saying simply, "Here's a song I wrote when I was fourteen."

The performance that followed was intense, subtle and loud, abrasive and smooth and as economical and alive as the day he first recorded it with The MGs.