Booker T. and MGs Gear Up for Neil Young : Pop music: The landmark R&B; group and the eclectic folk-rocker come to the Pacific Amphitheater--via Memphis.

Booker T. and the MGs, a band with an unusual ability to shift musical gears, has spent its summer tooling around Europe and the United States with Neil Young, who is famous for test-driving almost every rock-related model on the road.

Young has toured or recorded with rockabilly backup and with bands made up of country pickers. He has played techno-rock and acoustic folk, and for a while he fronted a big-band blues outfit called the Bluenotes. When he wants to play hammering garage rock, he can call on Crazy Horse, his on-again/off-again backup band since 1969.

Now Young has formed a touring partnership with one of the definitive R&B; bands of the 1960s. On their own, the Memphis-based Booker T. and the MGs (MG stands for “Memphis Group,” but also can be taken as a sports car reference) made a name for themselves with a series of instrumental hits that displayed the composing skills and musicianship of four exceptional players: organist Booker T. Jones, guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Donald (Duck) Dunn and the late drummer Al Jackson Jr.

As a unit, they also formed the core of the house band at Stax Records and thus made crucial contributions to the gritty Memphis soul sound that stood as a counterpoint to Motown’s more polished approach. Booker T. and the MGs supplied the heat for all of Otis Redding’s classics, for the finest moments of Sam & Dave, and for career-launching hits by Wilson Pickett.

Eclectic as he might be, Young has a high-pitched voice that doesn’t exactly qualify him as a Soul Man. So on the surface it would seem like a stretch--even by his own standards--for him to be teamed with a group so tied to definitive soul singers.

To Booker T. Jones, though, it’s a perfectly sensible, completely comfortable fit.

“Excuse the ego, (but) for Neil, it’s a marriage made in heaven,” Jones, 48, said over the phone last week from Denver, a stop on the tour that brings the Young/Booker T. and the MGs combination to Southern California for shows Thursday at the Pacific Amphitheatre and Saturday at the Los Angeles Sports Arena (Blind Melon and Social Distortion open at the Pacific; Blind Melon and Stone Temple Pilots are the under-card in L.A.)

R&B; is just one option among many for the MGs, Jones noted. If Young wants to show his country roots, they’ve got it covered. If he wants to go garage-rocking, they’re ready.

“I’ve got the country background from the stuff I did with Willie Nelson and Rodney Crowell,” said Jones, alluding to his work as producer of “Stardust,” Nelson’s 1978 hit album of pop standards, and Crowell’s mid-’80s country-rock effort “Street Language.” “There’s country-flavored songs in the show and acoustic folk. All that is not thrown out. Steve and Duck play country very well.”

In fact, Cropper said in a separate interview, one of his personal goals nowadays is to follow up the soul landmarks he co-wrote in the ‘60s--Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” and Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood”--by establishing himself as a writer of country hits. “It’s nothing for me to write country,” said the guitarist, who has lived in Nashville for almost six years. “I grew up on the Grand Ol’ Opry.”

As for Young’s penchant for bashing it out garage-band style, Jones figures that Booker T. and the MGs were already on that wavelength when Young was still playing the coffeehouse folk circuit in Canada. “If you think back on the stuff we did like “Satisfaction” with Otis, “In the Midnight Hour” and “Knock on Wood,” that’s all pretty heavy rock guitar stuff. If you look at it in today’s context, the rhythm is the same, the backbeat is the same. It’s a good marriage.”

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Booker T. and the MGs were adept at shifting gears before the players involved even thought of themselves as a cohesive band.

One of their early sessions together resulted from a call that Jones, Cropper and Jackson happened to get in 1962 for a recording date at Stax to back up a rockabilly-country singer named Billy Lee Riley. Memories differ as to whether Riley failed to show up (Jones’s recollection) or whether his session ended early (Cropper’s version). In either case, the backing players wound up using some free studio time for a blues jam that caught the ear of Stax boss Jim Stewart.

“He said, ‘This could almost be a single,’ ” Cropper recalls. They called the blues piece “Behave Yourself,” and immediately set about recording another song that could serve as its flip side. Cropper says he reminded Jones about an organ riff Jones had been toying with. “He played that little pattern, and it became ‘Green Onions.’ ”

“Green Onions” was a huge seller and remains the band’s signature song. Jones’ organ keyed the track’s slinky, sexy, mysterious feel, and Cropper weighed in with a characteristically terse, biting guitar solo. Factor in Jackson’s wondrously economical drumming, a firm, presence-filled bass, and a lean recording approach that gave all instruments plenty of space, and you had the fundamentals of the Booker T. and the MGs sound (Lewis Steinberg was the bassist on “Green Onions” and the rest of the MGs’ debut album of the same name; Dunn, an old playing partner of Cropper’s, was brought in after Steinberg and the other members had a falling-out).

As the ‘60s went on, the group scored with straight-ahead R&B; but also branched out with covers of pop standards and rock hits of the day, including an especially sweet reading of the Rascals’ “Groovin.’ ” Another Top 10 instrumental hit, the Jones composition “Time Is Tight,” was one of the great anthems of the ‘60s, its regal surge summing up the decade’s urgent idealism and high hopes for social change--all without the aid of words or voices.

Cropper and Jones both were teen-age prodigies.

“I played in clubs (in Memphis’s Beale Street blues district) from the age of 13 or 14,” Jones said. “My dad would drive me down and pick me up. I had a real good relationship with my parents. They trusted that I would eventually go to college, and I did. I addressed their hopes for me.” Meanwhile, he added, “I was making pretty good money” to supplement the family budget (the “T” in Booker T., stands for Taliaferro, by the way--it also was his father’s middle name).

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Jones said he hooked up with Al Jackson in a club band led by Willie Mitchell, who later went on to produce Al Green’s hits of the early-’70s--sessions in which Jackson’s drumming would prove a crucial element. Cropper and Dunn, meanwhile, were a couple of Memphis white kids pumping out black-style R&B; in their high school band, the Mar-Keys. In 1961, the Mar-Keys broke through on the national charts with “Last Night,” a raucous and saucy instrumental hit.

“I wasn’t really happy with the road” as he toured with the Mar-Keys, recalled Cropper, an affably drawling man who will celebrate his 52nd birthday next month. “I decided to come back to Memphis and work in the studio.”

Cropper would get more than enough studio experience at Stax, where he and other members of the MGs not only served as the house band but also as staff producers. Booker T. and the MGs’ touring was limited by their studio chores and by the fact that Jones, who was only 17 when “Green Onions” took off, soon enrolled at Indiana University where he earned a music degree, majoring in trombone.

Tired as he’d been of the road, Cropper said he found it “extremely frustrating” that the band couldn’t tour more during Jones’ college years. “I knew we had something,” said Cropper, who during the same period was an on-again, off-again architectural engineering student at Memphis State.

“Forget the money. There was a lot of opportunity to better the band, do more things. We had a No. 1 record (actually a No. 3 if you go by the peak Billboard chart position for “Green Onions”) and we couldn’t do anything with it because of other priorities, you might say. (The limited touring) did give us an opportunity to record more, but our time in the studio was very limited because we were so involved with the other artists.”

Booker T. and the MGs drifted apart in the early 1970s when first Jones, then Cropper, moved to Los Angeles. The band planned a comeback a few years later but Jackson was murdered in Memphis in 1975. Jones, Cropper and Dunn teamed with a Jackson protege, Willie Hall, to record an album dedicated to Jackson’s memory, then went separate ways.

Jones produced records and did session work (one recent high-profile credit is his keyboards playing on Soul Asylum’s hit album “Grave Dancers Union”). Cropper and Dunn formed the nucleus of the Blues Brothers Band, the late-’70s novelty/R&B; revival outfit fronted by comics Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. During the past five years, Cropper said, the Blues Brothers Band, sans Aykroyd and featuring Stax alumnus Eddie Floyd on vocals, has been a

popular draw in Europe, keeping him and Dunn on the road.

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Last year, the Blues Brothers Band played at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Bob Dylan was on the bill, too, and he approached Cropper backstage about reuniting Booker T. and the MGs to serve as the house band for a planned concert/TV special marking Dylan’s 30th year as a recording artist.

When the day arrived last October, Booker T. and the MGs were there, supporting a diverse array of stars ranging from Stevie Wonder to Lou Reed, from Chrissie Hynde to Mary-Chapin Carpenter to Eric Clapton. And also Neil Young, who teamed with the MGs for rumbling takes on “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “All Along the Watchtower.” “It made (Young) feel very comfortable,” Cropper said of their first meeting and collaboration at what Young dubbed the “Bobfest.” The collaboration was brief, but it was enough for Young to propose the current tour.

“When he called me, he said, ‘I had a lot of fun with you guys,’ ” Cropper recalled. “He said, ‘If we do this thing, the first thing I don’t want you to do is run out and buy my records and learn my music. We’ll pick the songs and all come up with what we want to do together. I want you guys to come out and be you and play you.’ ”

The shows revolve around Young’s material, plus his version of “Dock of the Bay.” Booker T. and the MGs don’t have a separate showcase outside their role as Young’s backing band (the drummer for the tour is Jim Keltner, the highly-esteemed session pro).

But even in a backup role, Jones and Cropper think their band is getting a chance to reassert its identity.

“(Young) introduces us and talks about us a lot. A lot of people in the audience call for our songs,” Jones said. “The whole show is pretty much MG-ized as opposed to Neil Young-ized. He’s fitting into our groove, but his songs fit. ‘Helpless,’ ‘Southern Man,’ ‘Down By the River’--they’re all things that could have been done at Stax.”

The band has plans to stake out its own turf next spring: Jones said a new Booker T. and the MGs album, “Mo’ Onions,” already is finished, with session man Steve Jordan as the primary drummer. The all-instrumental release is being delayed until late March when Jones hopes his new label, Columbia, will be able to give it a bigger promotional push than it could this fall. “They have some important music coming out this year,” he said. “I just didn’t want them paying attention to all the others and not to ours.”

Cropper said Young has mentioned the possibility of extending the current tour and recording new songs with Booker T. and the MGs (although given Young’s frequent stylistic departures, he may be looking into raga-rock or Klezmer music when it comes time to record again).

In any case, “it’s going to be a busy year next year,” Cropper said with a laugh. “It seems like everything we do wants to continue. Between doing some Blues Brothers jobs and satisfying Neil’s wishes and promoting our own record, we’re going to be a busy bunch of guys.”

* Neil Young and Booker T. and the MGs, Social Distortion and Blind Melon play Thursday at the P a cific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. Show time: 6 p.m. $14-$30.25. (714) 979-5944.