Booker T: "Hey Ya!"

Sometimes there’s just plain comfort to be had in albums that sound exactly like you would expect them to. Nobody purchases an AC/DC record expecting anything other than power-chord misogyny and Chuck Berry riffs. Likewise, when you pick up a Booker T. Jones album featuring the Drive-By Truckers, you entirely anticipate fat Hammond Organ supplemented by Southern Rock crunch, and little else. Potato Hole the Stax legend’s first album in two decades, makes good on this and satisfies in this alone.

Potato Hole is the quintessential Summer BBQ record, too innocuous to end up on any year end Top Ten lists but a fine soundtrack to a sunny afternoon rife with burgers and microbrews. In turn, Booker T’s take on this Andre 3000 staple isn’t so much a proper cover as an uptempo organ jam that just uses the framework of “Hey Ya!” for inspiration. The Hammond may attempt to mimic Andre’s vocals, but the song sounds more like an inspired improvisation tossed into the middle of a thirty-minute Phish parlay than anything actually resembling the Outkast song. Again, not a surprise.

As with most of Potato Hole, one wishes the jamming was a little bit dirtier and less obviously confined to the four walls of the recording studio. But the last minute and a half, featuring little more than a Booker T organ freakout and Truckers’ drummer Brad Morgan whacking a cowbell, gets the job done right, with a “Green Onions” worthy energy. Yes, in many ways a “job”—but rarely does a nine-to-five reveal a true vocation like this.