Features

It’s a sad fact that so much of America’s musical infrastructure – the men and women whose session work powered thousands of pop chart hits and significant recordings – exists in near-obscurity. Consider The Funk Brothers, that collective of R&B musicians in Detroit who powered nearly every Motown session in the label’s golden age. Fans and collectors still sift through the vagaries of paperwork and memory to determine who lent their instruments to which song; the unofficial group’s members would be credited by name at the insistence of Marvin Gaye on his magnum opus What’s Going On in 1971 – more than a decade from Motown’s inception, and a year before many of the musicians had to make a tough decision about their employment and location as the company packed up to head to Los Angeles.

A similar fate could have befallen Booker T. & The M.G.’s, the legendary Southern soul ensemble who powered many of the sessions of the Memphis-based Stax Records throughout the 1960s. Only organist Booker T. Jones was cited in the liner notes of debut Green Onions (1962). Only on follow-up Soul Dressing (1965) was another member credited in the LP’s notes: guitarist Steve Cropper, one of the most consequential figures of the Stax universe and one of the finest practitioners of his instrument. Cropper died yesterday at his home in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 84.

Along with Jones, bassist Lewie Steinberg (replaced in 1965 by Donald “Duck” Dunn) and drummer Al Jackson, Jr., Cropper – lightheartedly known by some as “The Colonel” – was a charter member of The M.G.’s (“Memphis Group”) who also held considerable power in the Stax infrastructure. After Chips Moman departed the label, co-founder Jim Stewart appointed Cropper – whose group The Mar-Keys scored the 1961 Top 5 pop hit “Last Night” for pre-Stax label Satellite – as the company’s top A&R man. Stax would release records by Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, Johnnie Taylor, Otis Redding and other luminaries, and Cropper worked alongside many of them as a session player, producer, engineer and songwriter. (Composition credits included Floyd’s “Knock on Wood” – later a disco hit for Amii Stewart – Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” and Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” the first posthumous chart-topper in Billboard history.) He did all this simultaneously while being part of one of Stax’s key groups, scoring hits for The M.G.’s like “Green Onions,” “Hip Hug-Her,” “Groovin’,” “Hang ‘Em High” and “Time is Tight.” (Despite this sterling contribution to the label’s discography, Cropper recalled that most of the group’s tracks were sort of an afterthought, “using the last thirty minutes of a session, or when somebody else had called for a demo and didn’t show.”)

Wherever Cropper was in the Stax pecking order, the vitality he lent to sessions can’t be questioned. He was equally deft at zig-zag rhythm lines and scintillating leads -even on the same song, as heard in Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man,” where Sam Moore yelps a “play it, Steve” in the middle of the second refrain. Cropper was a utility player’s utility player: knowing his place in the band, but with a panache that you wouldn’t get with another musician – and you’d miss him if he’d been out of the picture entirely. Cropper would release several albums as bandleader for Stax/Volt before he departed the label in the early ’70s, including With a Little Help from My Friends (1969) and Jammed Together, which paired him with legendary guitarist Albert King (albeit as studio creations, due to their opposing schedules) and Roebuck “Pops” Staples.

After leaving the Stax fold, Cropper became a studio owner and session player who logged time with Rod Stewart, Tower of Power and Ringo Starr. His great second act, though, came when two soul-loving, hard-partying comedians, Saturday Night Live‘s John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, fashioned themselves as a musical act called The Blues Brothers. With a crack band that included members of SNL‘s ensemble and living legends like Cropper, Dunn and Matt “Guitar” Murphy, The Blues Brothers almost improbably crossed over in a big way: the live LP Briefcase Full of Blues not only topped Billboard‘s album chart but spun “Soul Man” back into the Top 20 of the Hot 100 singles survey, where Steve was on hand to replicate his licks. (Cropper even featured in not one, but two Blues Brothers films.) He’d also make time in studio and on stage for reunions with Booker T. & The M.G.’s (after a planned reunion was waylaid by Al Jackson’s tragic 1975 murder), recruiting legendary drummers like Willie “Too Big” Hall, Steve Jordan, Anton Fig and Jim Keltner – the latter of whom joined the group when they were the house band for Bob Dylan’s star-studded 30th anniversary concert in 1992, as well as a subsequent tour backing Neil Young.

Even with a heavy shelf of late-career honorariums – including two Grammys and induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Songwriters Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame – The Colonel never lost his fighting spirit. Just last year, he released the album Friendlytown as “Steve Cropper and The Midnight Hour,” a collection of musicians that included performancs by Billy F. Gibbons of ZZ Top and Brian May of Queen on lead guitar, Young Rascals organist Felix Cavallere, and drummer Simon Kirke of Bad Company. As is so often the case, time was the only thing that could beat a musician like Steve Cropper – and those minute hands are gonna have to be a lot more versatile than Cropper’s own if they’re going to scrape away the innumerable tunes to which he lent his sizzling guitar work. Knock on wood: in a hundred years, we’ll still be talking about him…hardly wastin’ time.